Malazan has been one book that has been talked about, recommended, read, and re-read by my friends so many times I finally decided I must read it. Last year I had set a goal for myself to read 15 books and finish the Lord of the Rings for the first time fully. I did so handily finishing LotR early and getting through 20 books in 2023. For 2024 I set myself quite a different goal, just 5 Malazan books. Knowing how dense these books are and how long the series is I backed myself down a few times from loftier goals to here. Just 5 books, and hopefully give myself space to put in a few quick reads here and there when I just need a break. So with Gardens of the Moon, it begins.

Gardens of the moon opens with a short flashback and then gets started late in a war campaign across a continent. Erikson does not baby you or hold your hand too much as it starts, immediately thrown into a world with millennia of history, magic accessed through other realms, gods minor and major, divination, and political treachery. A strong foundation for quite an interesting story.

Much of the early chapters I worked just to get the basics down, flipping back to the dramatis personae often repeating names and generally getting an idea of what’s going on. I lost the thread a few times trying to find individual peoples motivations (I never really figured out why the adjunct turned on Paran, or how he figured that out.) but clearly I started to see the writing on the walls, everything’s headed to Darujistan, and its going to end messy.

The middle chapters start to fill much of the world backwards. So much history existed and was forgotten, well executed world building. Learning  humans are relatively “new” on the scene and meddling in affairs too great for their own ends was a great show of human self-importance. I enjoyed seeing adjunct Lorn grapple with releasing an ancient Jaghut just for the purpose of waging a savage war. Eventually declaring Lorn dead, and herself just a hand of the empress.

As the story lines clash and interact, all players finally in Darujistan, the writing reaches a fever pitch. A sense of urgency is reached as plans final stages are kicked into action. But for all that I found the ending to be my least favorite of the book. Of 650 pages the last 100 took me the longest to get through as bigger events started to be compressed into shorter sentences. But what took me away was how much was introduced suddenly in the end to solve problems that seemed to just be unaccounted for.

Deus ex machina 1 fights deus ex machina 2…

The greatest loss I think is of the Jaghut Tyrants ability. Releasing a tyrant of old, a warlord, a genocider, finally sealed after herculean effort, turns into a back burner after thought to a dinner party. Anomander Rake does not even consider it his highest priority as his underlings can take care of it fine. Lorns response? Pocket demon. Bottle o’ monster. Already had a greater beast just carrying it on her person and absolutely none of the earlier qualms about releasing it.

Why would Crokus leave Darujistan after just recently promising his uncle and himself to learn, and find his place among the noble? Explode the uncle and make the highborn girl he chases meet someone else.

How in the world could Crokus a simple thief survive an encounter with all those chasing him through the chaotic night? Oops, actually the Crimson guard has been watching over him for some reason.

Vorcan the leader of the assasins guild a mysterious figure no one knows, far to powerful to be stopped by Baruk, another of the cabal, and a tiste andii. Ultimately to be stopped by Crokus chucking a brick at her.

Sure we can simply say that Oponn are watching over Crokus for some of this but it’s a little too handwavey to be satisfying.

The verdict? Yeah I still think the end is quite weak compared to the rest of the book. Will it turn me away from continuing the series? No, but it does bring my rating of this book down a bit certainly.

-5/5 scale: 1