Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson began his massive, seemingly unending Malazan Book of the Fallen series with Gardens of the Moon, a nine-hundred-plus page monstrosity published to some acclaim in Britain, but not on this side of the pond until 2004. This created almost a Cult of Erikson in the States, where its devotees, who often paid insane prices for imported mass-market paperbacks, watched us getting all het up over George R. R. Martin, Terry Goodkind, Robert Jordan, et. al., and gloated to themselves, knowing they had the real goods. Then came June 2004, and for the first time, Steven Erikson's Malazan books started being released domestically.

In all honesty, while Gardens of the Moon doesn't have the stature (or resultant epic feel) of George R. R. Martin's truly never-ending A Song of Ice and Fire, it certainly does the trick well enough with this opening shot. To try and recount the many pieces of plot in a thousand-word review would be to demean the complexity and richness of the book. Just get it and read it for yourself.

Erikson's characters are sometimes shallower than I'd like, but allowances must be made for this being, in essence, a book of setup; the characters do need room to expand. That said, he fills in a good deal on major and minor characters alike, and the novel does have enough characterization that the whole massive tome isn't just advancing the subplot that drives this first novel.

The second book, Deadhouse Gates, is slated to be released in America in February 2005. Read this one before then so you don't get behind.