I’m about 90% through Toll the Hounds with two books left, and I wanted to see whether my frustrations are shared or whether I’m missing something.

What I love: Erikson’s prose is some of the best in fantasy. The dialogue is sharp, the action is excellent, the settings are vivid, and when the musings land, they really land. Maybe 60% of them engage me, and a few have genuinely stuck with me. “Children are dying” and “compassion is given freely” are lines I’ll remember for a long time. The series is great, and that’s exactly why I find the problems frustrating.

1. Too much at once. After Midnight Tides, the POV count balloons, and the cost is that the stakes get diluted. It’s hard to care about a new character when I’ve only just met them and the book has to split its time across a dozen others. It hurts most at climaxes. I’m deep into a duel I care about, then I get a paragraph break and 20 pages of Nimander, a character I couldn’t care less about, before I can get back. The same thing happened in Memories of Ice, where I was in the middle of a battle and got pulled away to Mhybe for four pages. Cutting away isn’t the issue, since some of it works. But it keeps happening at the worst moments, and over time it breeds resentment that makes the climaxes land worse.

2. Threads that go nowhere. LOST is my favourite show ever, and I know it gets flak for throwing things at the wall, but Malazan makes it look disciplined. Plot lines get dropped, sometimes within the same book, and I end up wondering why they were introduced at all. Banaschar and D’rek in The Bonehunters looked like they’d lead to some eerie cult storyline, and nothing came of it. Reaper’s Gale teases an Icarium vs Karsa fight for the entire book, and it doesn’t happen. Even the Crippled God hasn’t intimidated me once, 90% of the way through Toll the Hounds. I get that Erikson likes subverting expectations, but there’s a difference between subverting a payoff and just never delivering one.

3. The magic and the dream sequences. I don’t need hard magic. Elder Scrolls and LOTR don’t have it either, and I love both. But soft magic works when it’s mysterious or at least consistent, and here it’s both unconstrained and constantly used to solve problems. The dreamworld and warren sections are the worst offenders. Udinaas’s chapters in Midnight Tides and Reaper’s Gale, and Quick Ben’s and the Hedge’s journey in Reaper’s Gale left me with no idea what I was meant to take away, whether it was worldbuilding, metaphor, or just plot. They felt like they only made sense to Erikson.

4. Power-ups and twists that don’t feel earned. This has been there since book one. Tattersail blows up and comes back as Silverfox. Paran goes from a young captain to Master of the Deck. Touching a hound’s blood somehow puts him inside the sword that killed it. A gift from a Tano spirit walker eventually makes the Bridgeburners ascendants and a perfect deus ex machina in House of Chains Even Memories of Ice’s biggest moment, Itkovian taking the pain of the Imass and the memories becoming ice that revives their dead warren, left me feeling something epic and poignant, but also confused about how the mechanics worked. It felt like Erikson wrote each idea as it occurred to him, not like it was building toward something. A few of these twists fit cleanly, but most seem to come out of nowhere.

5. Communication, not intelligence. I think I’m an adequate reader. When I follow a musing or a piece of worldbuilding, it’s pure fantasy exhilaration. But sometimes I think the problem isn’t that it’s meant to be hard to follow. I think Erikson had something clear in his head and it just didn’t make it onto the page. The logic of the world and the meaning of some of the laments and railings seem to exist fully in his mind and only partly in mine.

None of this makes it a bad series. I’m obviously invested, and I’ll finish it. But I think it could have been better with fewer POVs, tighter payoffs, and clearer communication.

Do others share these frustrations? Did they bother you, or do they get resolved or feel different on a reread? Please no spoilers past Toll the Hounds, right now I'm at the part where Rake is fighting Dassem and took a breather because I had been reading for 4 hours straight and also to vent a bit.

Since i feel like i already passed the peak of this amazing series, here's my actual ranking of the books i've read:

1. Deadhouse Gates
2. Toll the hounds
3. Gardens of the Moon
4. Memories of ice
5. House of Chains
6. The Bonehunters
7. Midnight Tides
8. Reaper's Gale

My dream rewrite would be a five-book series: books 1–4, followed by a reworked Toll the Hounds as the finale. Anomander Rake’s sacrifice would also lead to the death of the Dying God, reimagined as the Crippled God’s liberated reincarnation. Bringing those threads together into one final climax, across five dense, tightly woven books, would have been perfect for me.

Share your thoughts about your ranking compared to mine :)

My ideal Malazan would have been five books, ending with a reworked Toll the Hounds

Malazan has given me some of the most powerful reading experiences of my life. But the further I get into the series, the more I find myself imagining a shorter version: five dense, tightly woven books, built around books 1–4, with a substantially reworked Toll the Hounds as the finale.

Obviously, this would require a massive rewrite. I’m talking about a different overall structure, with the major conflicts and character arcs developed toward a shared ending.

For me, the Letheras storyline is where I first started feeling that Erikson was losing his grip on the story. I don’t mean that the writing suddenly became bad, or that those characters and ideas have no value. There’s a lot there to admire. But that was the point where the expansion of the world started working against my investment in it.

After four books spent building attachments and trying to understand how the different conflicts fit together, being moved into another enormous setting, with another cast and another political and historical framework, felt exhausting. I wanted the existing threads to deepen and converge. Instead, I felt I was being asked to start the process of finding my bearings all over again.

And it wasn’t just the change of location. It was the growing sense that every answer opened several more questions, and every storyline brought another layer of history, metaphysics, or deliberate uncertainty. I enjoy having to work as a reader, but eventually that uncertainty stopped feeling intriguing and started becoming a barrier to emotional involvement. I could still appreciate individual scenes while feeling increasingly disconnected from the direction of the series as a whole.

That’s why Toll the Hounds feels so compelling to me as the foundation for an alternative ending. Anomander Rake’s sacrifice has the emotional weight and sense of culmination I would want from a series finale. My dream rewrite would bring the Crippled God’s storyline into that same climax.

In this version, the Dying God would be reimagined as the Crippled God’s liberated reincarnation: a being finally freed from his original imprisonment, but still shaped and corrupted by everything he had suffered. His liberation would therefore become part of the final crisis, with the consequences of that suffering reaching their culmination.

Rake’s sacrifice would also lead to the Dying God’s death, bringing those threads together in one final convergence. It could preserve the tragedy and compassion of the story while giving the central conflict a resolution inseparable from one of its most powerful character moments.

What appeals to me is the possibility of five books in which the density steadily builds toward that ending. The mysteries, detours, and histories would still be there, but their relationship to the final climax would feel stronger.

I understand that the sprawling scale is a huge part of what other readers love about Malazan. For me, though, a more concentrated version could have preserved everything that made me fall in love with it while avoiding the fatigue I started feeling around Letheras. Five books ending on a reworked Rake sacrifice would have been my ideal version.

In Deadhouse Gates book, the Chain of Dogs storyline, Keneb remembers when he last heard the word Jhistal which causes him to find Blistig. Blistig doesn't march out of Aren based on this information. What is the significance of the word Jhistal to Keneb which clues him in that Mallick Rel will betray the Empire?

After I finish NoTME, I plan on reading one of those two but can't decide which, any advice to give?

I’m currently reading LoB. Random thoughts on the world.
Do the warrens and holds give substance and stability to the world? Like the environment and workings of nature? Like, is magic one of the lifebloods and foundations of its reality? Would the world cease to be able to function if the warrens and holds disappeared? I guess my underlying confusion is, if Icarium created all of these new warrens, why isn’t the world way more screwed up IF the warrens and holds up until then where responsible for its creation and stability?

I am currently reading House of Chains, but I'm getting a bit confused about the hierarchy and size of the Malazan military.

My understanding is that size goes from largest to smallest:

Army, Legion, Company, Squad. Am I correct? What is the size of these groups, how many companies make up a legion etc?