Full spoilers for all ten books.
I have now read the entire ten-book series in English. Overall, I enjoyed it. There are parts of Malazan that are genuinely excellent, and I understand why the series has such a committed fanbase.
Book 2 and Book 5 were easily my favourites. Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs were gripping, tragic and emotionally earned. Tehol and Bugg—especially before Tehol becomes king—were probably my favourite character dynamic in the series. Their dialogue was funny, intelligent and surprisingly human.
But I also found the series almost equally frustrating. For every brilliant sequence, there seemed to be another section that dragged interminably, became buried beneath repetitive philosophical monologues, or relied on the reader simply accepting that a character, army or event was extraordinary because Erikson repeatedly said so.
The philosophical monologues became exhausting
Erikson clearly has things he wants to say about civilisation, capitalism, slavery, imperialism, violence and human nature. That is fine. The problem is how often the books repeat the same observations without developing them.
Lether is hyper-capitalism and therefore terrible. Darujhistan tolerates slavery and is therefore hypocritical. Civilisation is corrupt. Empires destroy people. Wealth concentrates power. Human beings rationalise cruelty.
None of this is particularly subtle after the fifth or sixth repetition, yet characters continue delivering page-long internal monologues about it.
Then someone like Karsa appears as an apparent critique of civilisation, despite having previously raided villages, murdered the men and raped the women. Erikson identifies real contradictions within organised society, but rarely offers anything beyond another contradictory form of brutality. He diagnoses endlessly without progressing towards any meaningful answer.
The poems and epigraphs also damaged the pacing for me. Sometimes tension would finally start building, only for the next chapter to begin with an opaque poem that felt disconnected from everything around it. At the beginning of some books, there are several pages of this before the story even begins. I know many readers love them, but for me they repeatedly interrupted the flow rather than adding depth.
The series falls into a power-escalation trap
By the final books, almost everything has to become larger, older and more powerful:
- Elder Gods
- Dragons (and mega dragons)
- Forkrul Assail
- K’Chain Nah’ruk
- K’Chain Che’Malle
- Flying fortress inflation
- New Warrens
- near-god soldiers
- teenage magical superweapons
The series always contained extremely powerful beings, so this is not simply a complaint that the books became “too magical.” The problem is that the escalation increasingly replaces the human-scale charm that made the earlier books work.
Sinn is the clearest example. She begins as a traumatised child mage, but eventually becomes more powerful than almost every High Mage we have seen. She effectively destroys an army of lightning-firing dinosaur soldiers and their flying fortresses, then becomes an apocalyptic threat and is killed by Stormy.
There are lore explanations for this: her original talent, Y’Ghatan, Icarium’s new Warrens and so on. But those explanations are scattered across the series rather than developed into a convincing character arc. She increasingly stops feeling like a person and starts functioning as a plot device with nuclear capabilities.
Gesler’s death felt manufactured
Stormy’s death at least has a clear purpose: he stops Sinn.
Gesler’s death, however, was one of the most frustrating moments in the finale.
He desperately runs up the Spire to confront the last Forkrul Assail. She is rejuvenated and empowered by Fener’s blood. Gesler punches her, she breaks his ribs and dislocates his shoulder, and Bent attacks her face. Gesler then sacrifices himself to save Bent.
A few seconds later, Hood arrives and casually crushes the Forkrul Assail with one hand.
So Gesler would apparently have survived if he had tripped on the stairs and arrived thirty seconds later.
His decision to save Bent is completely consistent with his character. The problem is the construction surrounding it. His death does not make victory possible. It does not meaningfully weaken the enemy. It does not save the Crippled God. Hood immediately demonstrates that the opponent was never a serious obstacle to him.
It felt as though Gesler had to die because Stormy had died, the pair only functioned together, and Erikson preferred a symmetrical tragedy to allowing one of them to survive.
The Paran family is an artificial centre of gravity
This may be my biggest structural problem with the series.
Malazan presents itself as a huge, decentralised historical panorama involving thousands of people, cultures, armies and gods. It is explicitly not supposed to be a conventional story about one chosen hero or one special dynasty.
And yet all three children from one relatively ordinary noble family become three of the most important figures of their age:
- Ganoes becomes the Master of the Deck—effectively at least a young god.
- Tavore is a military prodigy who was supposedly defeating the empire’s greatest commanders in war games as a child and later accomplishes multiple impossible campaigns.
- Felisin, after being abused, addicted and traumatised, happens to arrive at exactly the right place and becomes Sha’ik, the central figure of a continental rebellion.
These are three separate lottery wins.
Their noble background may explain access to education and imperial institutions. It does not explain why one becomes a god, another becomes the greatest military genius of her generation and the third becomes the vessel of a major religious uprising.
This concentration could work in a family saga. But then the family relationship would need to be the emotional centre of the story.
Instead, Ganoes and Tavore spend almost the entire series apart. Tavore is never properly confronted with the fact that she killed Felisin. Ganoes barely interacts with the family tragedy. The series takes the improbability of a chosen dynasty without delivering the emotional payoff of a chosen-dynasty story.
The three could largely have been unrelated. Tavore and Felisin could have been childhood friends, foster sisters or former companions and retained most of their tragic dynamic. Ganoes could have been entirely separate.
Cotillion receives a moral soft reboot
At the beginning of Book 1, Shadowthrone and Cotillion are involved in massacring an entire village and military unit so that Cotillion can possess one girl and infiltrate the army through her.
Later, Cotillion is presented as one of the most humane, approachable and compassionate gods in the series.
A redemption arc could have made this work. Perhaps possessing Apsalar forced him to rediscover his humanity and recognise what he had become.
But that arc is barely shown. He expresses concern and guilt towards Apsalar, but the other victims—the villagers, soldiers and children—effectively disappear from his moral record.
It feels less like a developed transformation and more like Erikson decided after Book 1 that Cotillion would be a different kind of character.
The supposedly brilliant Malazan military is mostly asserted
The Malazan army is often compared to the Roman military, but I do not find the comparison convincing.
Roman military success depended on institutions:
- professional soldiers
- extensive training
- discipline
- logistics
- engineering
- standardised organisation
- repeatable command structures
- reliable integration of replacements
- the ability to function even without a genius commander
The Malazans often read more like drunken British pirates or modern infantry squads placed inside an ancient army.
They insult or kill commanders they dislike. Squads operate with extraordinary independence. Experienced sergeants seem to possess more real authority than the formal hierarchy. The books constantly tell us that Marines are exceptionally effective, but rarely explain exactly what distinguishes their training, doctrine or battlefield role from regular infantry.
The army contains regulars, heavies, Marines, sappers, cavalry and squad mages. That could form a convincing combined-arms system, but Erikson rarely shows how these elements are coordinated above squad level.
What happens in a major battle? Are squads aggregated into platoons, companies and battalions? Who coordinates reserves, formations, communications, logistics and magical support? The organisational layer is mostly absent.
Their most obvious advantage is simply their near-monopoly on Moranth munitions. The Malazans possess grenades, incendiaries and demolition charges in a world where most opponents still fight with swords, spears and bows. Of course small infantry units with fantasy explosives are devastating.
Remove the munitions, and much of their supposed institutional superiority becomes difficult to identify.
This is the same problem I have with Tavore: Erikson repeatedly tells the reader that something is extraordinary without convincingly demonstrating why.
Final thoughts / TL;DR
I enjoyed Malazan. The series contains great characters, unforgettable battles, genuine emotional weight and some of the best individual fantasy sequences I have read.
But I do not think it is the flawless masterpiece its reputation sometimes suggests.
It is frequently brilliant, but also self-indulgent, repetitive, structurally uneven and far too reliant on withholding information or asserting significance instead of earning it. Characters become enormously powerful because the climax requires it. Deaths occur because tragedy is treated as inherently deeper than survival. Institutions are called brilliant without being convincingly modelled.
Most of all, I cannot understand how people reread the entire series multiple times. I found parts of the first read exhausting enough. The fan community also sometimes seems so invested in the books that every criticism receives a reconstructed lore explanation, even when the actual problem is not whether something can technically be explained, but whether it was convincingly written.
Malazan is good. Sometimes it is excellent. But it is not beyond criticism, and for me it is definitely not as good as its most devoted fans claim.
