Gardens of the Moon is volume one of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I know another damn, multi-volume series (this one is ten volumes and counting).

It’s pretty redolent of Glen Cook’s Black Company, but somewhat better (I read the first three books in Cook’s series and left feeling underimpressed).

Like that earlier series, it portrays a grittier side of war, that purports to capture some of the experiences of folks caught up in events larger than themselves (the little people, as it were), but Erikson sometimes seems to shy away too much. A character that I had grown to like was suddenly killed, which was sad, but I respected it. I respected less when a bit of deus ex machina legerdemain brought her back into the series.

But he’s good at humanizing characters and at showing the good side of villains and the bad side of the semi-heroes. Of course, George R.R. Martin does that much better, but we’ll be waiting another five years, at least, for the next volume. There are already ten or so Malazan books out there.

And as I’m writing this, I am actually reminded of those old Thieves’ World books, which were collections short stories taking place in an a shared fantasy environment, so writers had to be careful not to mess things up for their fellow writers by upsetting the balance of the world or killing off too many characters. This has that feel, that the author is trying to write his epic while staying inside these fixed lines. I don’t know. Something like that. I don’t have enough desire (actually, I have exactly none) to go back and read any of those to see if my comparison holds true.

Credit where credit is due: the finale is a blockbuster. But it’s also dominated by characters who appeared later in the book. A lot of loose ends get cut, but the mysteries associated with them, not so much. Maybe the author will return to them, but it felt like he’d moved on.

I’m not actually sure I’m going to continue reading this series. While Jordan’s Wheel of Time may skew towards to nearly unbearably turgid and his ability to write about romantic relationships in ways that non-embarrassing me effectively non-existent, but you do care about his characters (especially his female characters, at least for me). I am unsure whether I really care enough about Paran, Tattersail, Crokus (now that’s a Black Company style name!), et al to get the second book, unless it shows up at a used bookstore at a decent price.