Tormented by questions, the army totters on the edge of mutiny, but Adjunct Tavore will not relent. Savaged by the K’Chain Nah’Ruk, the Bonehunters march for Kolanse, where waits an unknown fate. Erikson's grand finale will shock and astound you! Whatever you thought would happen, push that from your mind. But if there is one thing I should have learned over the years, it's that Steven Erikson has many, many tricks up his sleeve, and he delights in misdirecting his readers and hitting us with the unexpected in the nick of time.

I was concerned that we would be witnesses to the mother of all convergences, a mindfuck of an ending, only to be forced to wait to find out what happens when the smoke clears.Īnd for about the first half of the novel, it felt as though this would be the case. Now, if there is enough material to fill two separate Malazan installments (which are rarely slender volumes, it must be said), I was left wondering just how many plotlines would ultimately be resolved by the end of The Crippled God. I might have to float the possibility of breaking it into two separate projects: one to compliment Steve’s tenth, the second to focus on the epilogue story entirely. Structurally, it might be the most difficult one for me to pull off. It would offer a “fuller” understanding of many of the plot lines, etc. Hopefully, however, we’ll manage it so that there will be opportunity to cast light on some of the theaters of action in the final crux.

The goal is for that last one to compliment Steve’s tenth.

This has been my fear since Ian Cameron Esslemont elaborated on one of his future Malazan projects in this interview: Understandably, given the depth of this multilayered saga with its myriad storylines, my biggest fear was that the ending would leave us with so many unanswered questions that it would, no matter how exciting the finale, be somewhat of a disappointment to a certain extent. The very thought of reaching the end of Steven Erikson's mind-boggling The Malazan Book of the Fallen made me giddy! Vaster in depth, vision, and scope than any other fantasy epic ever written to this day, it was impossible to believe the series was actually ending.

The crippled god subterranean press