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literary-illuminati · 15 days ago

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2025 Book Review #11 – Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson

Introduction

One of my reading goals for 2025 is to get through the entire Malazan series at a rate of one a month or so (a commitment I made thinking Gardens of the Moon was representative and not the shortest in the set, but I digress). I went into Deadhouse Gates knowing almost nothing about the plot, but having had it talked up to me relentlessly as the point where the series hits its stride and gets really properly good. On one level I can absolutely see this – Erikson’s craft absolutely improved immensely between writing Gardens and Gates, and the characterization work is (on the whole) so much better the returning characters barely even seem like the same people. But – while it’s certainly an excellent book overall – it had some weaknesses and irritating ticks that had me wishing it was more like Gardens at several points.

The novel is set on the (sub-)continent of Seven Cities, a rich and ancient land lately conquered by the Malazan Empire, and now a restive project afflicted with moments prophecies and on the very edge of rebellion. With a decadent and incompetent governor uninterested in preparations or an organized response, the rebellion will see colonists and officials slaughtered wholesale across the land, with only the capital city of Aren itself able to hold out and await the relief of an imperial punitive expedition from the metropole. By cosmic coincidence, just as things come to a head the wastelands in the continents heart are overrun with shapeshifters of all kind – mages and skinchangers driven rabid with lust for power, seeking the mythical Path of Hands and it’s promise of Ascension and dominion over all their kind as a new god of beasts.

Amid the anarchy and bloodshed, the book follows five different points of view, each on their own variably ill-fated journey across the continent. By far the most detailed – and the one acting as a spine for the whole book – is the imperial historian Duiker, acting as witness and chronicler to the epic death-march of the 7th Army and the tens of thousands of refugees it protects across the continent, to hoped-for sanctuary beneath Aren’s walls. He’s a window rather than a protagonist, allowing the reader a close and personal view of the imperial general Coltaine and the 7th ‘s struggles and valour fighting the impossible odds arrayed against them.

Around the edges of that narrative (and, to my mind, in the main far more interesting) are our other points of view – a disgraced noble heiress-turned-penal-slave and her fellow escapees from a brutal imperial mine, an itinerant warrior walking the earth alongside his immortal friend in his quest for his lost memories, an outlawed legionary and assassin on his way back to the capital to kill the Empress for her crimes, and a similarly outlawed sapper and his ragtag band of travelers caught up in the plots and whims of gods they want absolutely nothing to do with.

Across just under a thousand pages, they give first-hand views of the rebellion’s initial stages and hints of what seem likely to be the actual plot of this whole ten-volume saga. And suffer. Mostly the suffering, really.

History and Worldbuilding

The very first thing anyone ever talks about with Malazan is the setting, and the real sense of depth and history that Erikson brings to it. Which is pretty much entirely deserved – this is a series where the setting and metaphysics came first, and the actual plot is at least kind of mostly just an excuse to explore and share it with people. Whether you find this interesting or charming or think it sounds like the most tedious reading experience imaginable is probably the first filter on whether you will actually enjoy this book (and the series as a whole) or not.

Now, that was always the promise of the series, but this is an area where Deadhouse Gates lives up to it far better than Gardens did. Erikson is, I’m told, an archaeologist and anthropologist by training and of but you can tell. Not always for the better with the anthropology bit, but the sheer enthusiasm with which the book regards broken shards of pottery and the impact of prehistoric tells on geography is really incredibly charming.

The book manages the effect a lot of fantasy tries for but very few succeed at – a sense of real deep, mythic history, of layers of ruined cities and dead gods whose memory still weighs upon and affects the world of the living and whose tragedies and dramas can be seen in the shape of the world wherever you might look. Very nearly every single one of the book’s most affecting passages and pieces of imagery are from a point of view exploring (or at least wondering through) some ancient ruin of a fallen or forgotten civilization, or else being haunted by their ghosts and the ways the present now rhymes with the past.

Far more than Gardens, Gates really does sell the feeling of a vast, wondrous, terrible world – full of unseen actors and only barely glimpsed conflicts that nonetheless shape the field of play our actual protagonists are acting upon. This is probably best expressed with the whole shapeshifter highlander that’s happening slightly off to the side of the plot for 90% of the book but still causes absolutely no end of problems for all the most interacting characters, as well as the sheer number of bizarre and near-lethal encounters with strange and ancient creatures the different traveling parties have by apparently random chance.

The less commendable expression of this is the sheer number of dei (and diaboli) ex machina Erikson keeps throwing into the plot whenever he’s not quite sure where to go or how to get a specific beat he wants to. The sudden appearance of a never-before-mentioned magical courier company crashing through dimensions to give Coltaine and (separately) Fiddler’s party exactly the resupply they needed to lift their spirits on behalf of interested parties on a literal different continent who had apparently somehow been following the drama of this remote death march with baited breath very nearly made me throw the book down in exasperation (and it’s hardly unique here).

Nuance and Characterization

All that said, by far the biggest improvement between Gardens and Gates is the quality of character-writing. Not necessarily in terms of giving distinct internal monologues (there are more than a few passages of Kalam’s narration you could put in Duiker’s mouth and no one one would blink), but the arcs and internal conflicts of every point of view character are far, far better written and more compelling than in the previous installment (not least because the book is far less likely to outright explain what that arc or internal conflict is in pseudo-objective monologue). Most (with a few very notable exceptions I’ll get to later) of the major supporting characters are similarly improved, seeming far more like people and less like the plot mechanisms or broad fantasy archetypes a decent chunk of Gardens secondary cast tended to default to.

The love and quality are admittedly a bit unevenly distributed, though. Felisin is by far the most psychologically interesting and nuanced character we spend any time in the head of – basically entirely because of her complete and total lack of self-knowledge as she tries (badly) to cope with all the horrible, life-ruining trauma. The fact that her sections lacked any sort of moral authority figure – there’s no character whose ever signposted as being uniquely enlightened or perfectly informed or even just usually right, everyone is a massive asshole in one way or another – too.

Though if Felisin’s is the best narrative running through the book, Mappo and Icorium get an easy second place. Again, in large part off the strength of their characterization – their relationship is really compelling! Their friendship feels real and sincere, and the genuine tragedy underlying it all both works and adds real poignancy (though frankly, having the destroyed village used to motivate Mappo be a false flag feels like an immense and unneeded cop-out here). It also helps that the pair of them are so thoroughly part of the setting’s deep history and still affected by and chained to the world’s ancient past in a way none of the others are – in a way they like the most purely Malazan characters, the arc that mostly perfectly expresses the series’ strengths.

As for the others – Fiddler is generally inoffensive as a point of view to the plot, though deeply generic and uninteresting as a character in his own right. But he gets partial credit for all the screen-time Pust gets, whose just a delightful cartoon character on the page and the only genuine comic relief the book has to break up the grim monotony (Apsular is also a good character with interesting ties to the wider setting. Crokus feels like the thinly sketched generic kid hero you kill off at the end of chapter one in a satire or deconstruction). Kalam is a decent action-adventure hero, and much more engaging for the fact that he’s genuinely makes mistakes and falls for tricks compared to a lot of the series’ legendary badasses, but crippled by a) a complete lack of internal reckoning or rumination over the fact that he literally kicked off the rebellion he spends most of the book wading through the atrocities of and b) an incredibly unsatisfying and bathetic where his book-long revenge quest is entirely resolved by five minutes of unconvincing platitudes from the women he was trying to kill.

Duiker, meanwhile – Well, as a character he was great. The two best passages in the whole book are him philosophizing. The issue is-

The Chain of Dogs

I have a rather limited tolerance for straight-faced heroic military chronicles, and the spine of this book was a story that for most of its length felt like it was making it a mission to hit every tired cliche in the genre I can think of. Or okay, that’s harsh. It isn’t all bad – the lead-up to the rebellion was full of intrigue and promise, the side-plot with the Senk god was very good, the ending was (if a bit clumsy and extremely bluntly done) compelling tragedy. As for everything else – well, let’s say there were a lot of time where resisting the urge to skim down to the next POV was a downright heroic effort.

The biggest issue is Coltaine. He, far more than Duiker, is the actual protagonist of the plot thread, the character whose efforts and struggles determine the plot and who virtues define the whole tragedy it ends up being. Which is unfortunate, because he only barely escapes being a complete cliche right out of central casting. For basically the entire book, he’s nothing but a caricature – the grim, taciturn military genius, the stoic badass who wins the undying loyalty of his troops speeches or grandstanding because he’s just the good, the strategic savant whose victory against impossible odds is assured unless he is undercut by treachery or incompetence from those around him. His plans always work, his gut calls always turn out for the best, his harsh sacrifices are always in the end perfectly justified.

God but he is one of the most boring characters I’ve ever had to sit through however many hundreds of pages trying to convince me of how impressive he is. The only historical figures that come close are the ones only remembered through their own propaganda. Which would be not great but fine if he was a secondary character or a plot device, but again he really is the functional protagonist of the entire narrative. Did we really need two different chapter-long battle scenes where Duiker is sure they’re all doomed but Coltaine’s clever plan that was never communicated to any of his subordinates works perfectly and the legendary valor of the Malazan army defeats impossible odds? Did they have to both be river crossings?

Which also does a lot to drain the tension and interest out of the politics and interpersonal drama that is the actually interesting part of war – with basically no exceptions of any consequence, Coltaine is right and whoever is arguing against him (especially if they aren’t also a hard-bitten professional soldier) is wrong. For a story ostensibly about the heroic effort to protect this chain of refugees, the only actual refugee characters who get names and lines are a trio of nobles – of whom one dies early and the other two are portrayed as some of the most thoroughly contemptible characters in the whole story. You could have replaced the entire refugee host with an equally large and ungainly herd of sacred cattle and lost remarkably little.

The High Fist comes off even worse, of course – as the single and ultimate cause of every fuckup the Malazan forces make through the entire book, really. It undermines the whole trap and destruction of the army at the very end of the book when it seems less due to any particularly clever stratagems on the rebels part and more because he’s a blithering idiot who can be relied upon to make the single worst decision in literally every situation. I kept waiting for the book to give him some bit of interiority, some hidden depths or even self-serving justifications for his actions – and it just never arrived.

And then there’s the matter of the opposition.

Conflict and Culture

I give D&D-inspired fantasy a lot of leeway for having some, let’s say unfortunate subtext. It’s buried deep into the bones of the genre and digging out is not a project that will at all fit a lot of stories. But a) this is a thousand-page-long tome that’s incredibly interested in invented culture and sociology and b) my god every bit of the book’s description of Seven Cities and the rebellion feels like its from a 19th century London tabloid competing to have the most lurid and exaggerated ‘true tales of the outrages in the colonies’. Seven Cities is obviously and deliberately patterned off west/south Asia (the rebel messiah is almost literally named Sheik, there are nearly as many talwars as potsherds), but it feels less inspired by any actual culture or history than by colonial propaganda and 1001 Arabian Nights. (The Wickans are not nearly as bad – they do feel like a real culture with texture and internal divisions and tradition. But everything about them is just entirely in thrall to what Brett Devereaux calls the Fremen Mirage – more based off the mythology of the terrifying and masterful nomadic warrior-civilization than any particular historical referent.)

It is not that I have any objection to depicting the brutality and atrocities of (especially civil) warfare but like c’mon – the book literally contrives to have fanatical child soldiers forcing the 7th to slaughter them to protect the refugees. Functionally every rebel we see at any point is either a bloodthirsty religious zealot or a child-raping murderous bandit pretending to be one. Their only halfway competent general in a traitorous Malazan commander who ‘went native’ - and in any event in battle they’re all bloodthirsty savages whose only hope of victory is sheer weight of numbers of shocking brutality and treachery. I’d say they might as well all be orcs, but I legitimately think orcs in LOTR might have been depicted with more nuance and more moments of humanization.

And it’s not like there’s any nuance here – the book is quite explicit that with one exception the Malzann conquest of the continent was humane and restrained. Which entirely tracks with the functionally-inhumane discipline the 7th Army shows throughout the book. On one hand an endless horde of decadent, treacherous city-dwellers and bloodthirsty horse nomads, on the other the least predatory- or -atrocity inclined premodern army in the history of creation. For a book that everyone talks about the grimness and moral ambiguity of, it seems incredibly and exhaustingly one-sided – like Duiker has already gone through and edited out all the awful shit Malzan soldiers did to captives and the refugees under their charge to make the story sufficiently edifying for posterity.

What Gardens had, and Gates very much does not,is a conflict with humanized, compelling characters on both sides, a sense of the horror and brutality war inflicts – the quirky, likeable and heroic band of misfits stopped from leveling half a city and slaughtering thousands to enable an easy occupation by nothing but chance and circumstance. Maybe I’m coming in with my expectations set too high, but the series is always talked about in the same breath as A Song of Ice and Fire – it’s disappointing to see it so totally lacking Martin’s signature strength (though I suppose given all the foreshadowing I’ll just need to wait for the next book and a punitive expedition full of less inexplicably paladin-like Malazan soldiers for that).

Length and Breadth

I wouldn’t even mention a lot of the above if it was a shorter book, honestly. But it’s literally almost a thousand pages, you cannot possibly say there wasn’t space for these things (see also: it was I think literally 700 pages in when two women with names spoke to each other for the first time).

At a certain point, the book’s sheer length becomes a core part of the experience of reading it. I’m really fairly sure that a sufficiently mean editor could have cut this down to the same length as Gardens without dramatically changing the plot – but that’s kind of missing the point. The sheer weight of the thing – the amount of time you spending in characters heads, and just marinating in the world – is a key part of the appeal in its own right.

It’s an appeal I do absolutely get, too. The lengthy tangents about (literal) ancient history and abstract metaphysics or theology, the loving descriptions of monsters that show up for two or three scenes at most, the whole episodes where some weird magical shit intrudes on the plot and the protagonists just have to deal with it for a bit – these are by far some of the best parts of the books, and not ones that could possibly be justified through any strict economizing of word count.

Still, though. The book is basically a cube. A hardcover edition would be a worryingly practical murder weapon.

Death, Legacy and Vengeance

For my money the best passage in the book is not actually the one monologue from Duiker about children dying that everyone always quotes (though it is very good, to be fair) – it’s one a bit later on, as he (if I remember right) considers the ancient Jaghut graves they are passing and hopes that when he dies, he is unmourned and forgotten. It’s a fascinating sentiment to hear from a man who so thoroughly identifies with his role as a historian, first of all, but it’s also the purest expression of what is for me easily the most interesting theme running through the book.

Seven Cities is oppressed by the past, and so are very nearly everyone we spend any time with at all. The Seventh Army marches past the memorials of a myriad-old genocide against the Jaghut and feels the touch of its ghosts and half-buried collateral damage (which is entirely unrelated to the much more recent slaughter they rouse the victims of to fight for them), Mappo and Icorium’s whole friendship is (at least at the outset) instrumental, a way to keep Icorium ignorant of what he’s done and unable to do it again, Felisin Kalan and Fiddler all spend most of the book suffering for the sake of machinations that predate and will outlast them, and seeking blood vengeance for the sake of what they’ve lost. And there’s an undercurrent running through the entire story that every atrocity inflicted by the rebels is a bloody debt that the coming punitive expedition will repay ten times of, and the cycle will only ever grow more and more dire.

And through it all there’s the sense that it’s the remembering that’s the problem. That if Icorium gave up his obsessive search for his path (and through it his father) he really could be happy. That all the souls still trapped in the mortal world to bear witness to some ancient tragedy are suffering for no real reason. A tragic sense that forgetting all the vicious prophecies and vendettas and starting with a clean slate is the only way to possibly fix things

It’s hardly the story’s biggest or most consistent theme – it’s outright contradicted more than once – but for a book that dwells on the past with such loving detail, it’s probably the one that struck me most.

In Summation

I’d apologize for how incredibly long and meandering this review is, but given the subject it really just seems appropriate. Deadhouse Gates is a mammoth of a book, big enough to include more both good and bad than I could hope to recount in detail. Despite finding the most prominent and largest plot thread more than a little tiresome, and wishing dearly for a bit for nuance and complexity in the presentation of the overarching conflict, on balance I definitely enjoyed it. The character work is far better than Gardens, and the worldbuilding (and presentation thereof) is an absolute delight. I am now incredibly invested in where Felisin and Mappo & Icorium’s stories go from here.

Recommended if you find any appeal in sprawling multi-POV dark/epic fantasy Tomes (much have a high tolerance for both exposition and extended battle scenes).

#book review #malazan #deadhouse gates #steven erikson #fantasy #map fantasy #2025 #21st century

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