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Book Entry · Fantasy
by Steven Erikson · 2001 · Malazan Book of the Fallen, book 3
The outlawed Malazan host of Dujek Onearm allies with yesterday's enemies — Caladan Brood, Rake, the Bridgeburners back in harness — against the Pannion Domin, a theocracy whose starving Tenescowri legions are weapon and atrocity at once, while beneath the war the crippled god's larger design surfaces and the K'Chain Che'Malle's dead machinery wakes. The siege of Capustan, the marines' chain of command under Itkovian's impossible grief-taking, the T'lan Imass at Silverfox's kettle: Erikson's great theme — compassion as the only counterweight to history's mass — states itself in full. The series' consensus masterpiece, and its most openly devastating volume.
Regularly ranked the finest single Malazan novel and one of epic fantasy's summit achievements: the book that converts the series' difficulty into earned, cumulative force.
Ten volumes, three continents, three hundred millennia of buried history and a cast of thousands: Erikson's archaeological epic of empire, gods and compassion among the fallen.
In the Guide from Malazan Book of the Fallen:
The most famous deep-end opening in fantasy and the launch of the genre's most ambitious completed epic: the ten-volume Book of the Fallen, delivered at a book a year, redefined what scale and difficulty a mainstream series could sustain.
Grimdark's defining debut: the close-voice, blackly comic register it established is now the house style of adult fantasy, and Glokta is the subgenre's signature creation.
The founding text of revisionist epic fantasy: George R.