Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen #2) by Stephen Erikson

So this is a rare 1.5 star rating for a book I did finish reading, because under normal circumstances I would have dropped this about 2 weeks ago! I only finished it because I want to give the third book in the series a shot before I call time on Malazan.. so I’m landing on 1.5 right now and we’ll see if that changes with time, because I really did not have a good time with about 60% of this fucking thing!

As ever, please bear in mind the 1.5 star is for my own personal enjoyment of this book – it’s not to say it’s a bad book it’s just a bad book for me.

I lost track of the number of times I’d put it down to search “Deadhouse Gates boring Duiker Reddit” and I’d find someone who’d posted about what a mind-numbing slog this book is to be told over and over that “the ending is worth it” and the third book is the best one and you just have to read that one to get it.

I read Gardens of the Moon and I didn’t hate it. It was hard work but I did get to a place where I was enjoying some of the characters, and felt like I was finding my feet in the world. I could see what people liked about it, I was up for reading more – even looking forward to it a little. Then Deadhouse Gates throws all that out the window and forces you through 950 pages of an entirely new location, with a new history it barely bothers to explain, another large cast of undeveloped characters who will very slowly cross a desert while something new tries to kill them or once or twice every chapter.

The good…

Now it wasn’t all bad, it actually really started well! The book opens with Felisin Paran, then fifteen year old sister of the guy from the previous book. She’s been rounded up by the other nobles in the city to form a chain gang heading to ships that will take them to a slave camp. It turns out her sister Tevore is the new Adjunct, and responsible for her being there. This was a promising opening that links to the previous book, with easy to understand emotional stakes that don’t rely on you somehow parsing a complicated political history the author never fully explains!

I actually thought Felisin was a great character, and shows that Erikson can write well rounded characters if he can be bothered to. She felt realistic as a spoiled noble brat who also happens to be a steel willed survivor. She uses the only thing she believes has left – her body – to survive as best she can in the mining camp, but she’s still a child, an angry, deeply traumatised teenager who judges others too quickly, and thinks she knows everything when really she knows very little. She has a tendency towards cutting off her nose to spite her face. She’s not a very likeable character but I understand why she is that way and I found her, and her dynamic with Heboric and Baudin to be the most interesting thing in this book.

We also get POV for Fiddler who was a background Bridgeburner in Gardens of the Moon and is now escorting Crokus and Apsalar to find her father (and along with Kalam to secretly try to assassinate Laseen). Characters I know! Fantastic. This stuff was fine, I liked getting to know Fiddler better. Kalam ends up with his own POV and adventure which I mostly found dull and oddly pace with the rest of everything else – I’d often forget all about him! – so I found it very disjointed but overall it was alright, even if sometimes Kalam seems a bit too OP for a human.

Then we get into the new characters. I immediately struggled with Mappo and Icarium because Erikson likes to randomly refer to them by their race instead of their names and I was confused in the early days over who or what “the Trell” or “the Jhag” was (honestly still unclear exactly what that means) and that really irritated me. It isn’t explained what was going on with them for bloody ages – in a way that felt deliberately obtuse – consequently I didn’t care about them until they finally joined up with Fiddler, and he could provide a better perspective on their relationship. One that doesn’t assume everything is already known!

The bad… Duiker

I know people like to praise how Erikson explores themes in each book, and I like to unpack a well done theme. The theme of this one is that war is fucking brutal, miserable and a waste of life – which I think is the theme of the whole series. This could have been interesting, but the way he writes it is mainly through the POV of Duiker, a Historian with the Malazan army, crossing the desert with a train of refugees in tow. Duikers chapters the dryest and dullest reading I’ve endured in a very long time.

While I was enjoying the early part of the novel, every time the POV came back to him my heart sank.

Then came chapter 10 which was an hour and a half (according to my Kindle) of slogging though until I realise this was all fucking Duiker and that actually this novel is about bloody Duiker, and the bits I liked with Felisin, Fiddler and the others are essentially the subplot and they had faded to the background.

For the first half of the book Duiker has no personality, it’s just watching him watching other characters have conversations about military manoeuvres. Eventually he does start to express his own thoughts and opinions but by then I just do not care because he’s bored me to tears for approximately 600 pages already and I just could not focus on him. I started reading online summaries after each chapter to make sure I had caught key events, because I was struggling so much to pay attention. I have never had to do that with a book before, and I had to force my way through several boring classics for my English degree!

As for promises that “the ending is worth it” … Well the ending really relies on the reader giving a shit about what happens… Because otherwise it feels like another fuck you from the author, and kind of a waste of time. From discussion with friends who have read the series, I think maybe what people mean is that the ending and events of this book are a key event in the series referenced a lot of the following books and maybe that’s why people think it’s so great. From what I understand it’s also something of a tone setter as it introduced the Malazan army and how they operate, and that’s going to be in every future book. Bad news for me because milatary stuff in very boring!

I get what the author was going for with the ending (and I’ve loved similar type “realistic” endings in better books) but if you don’t get me to feel invested in the characters and their relationships I’m not going to be moved by it, no matter how inspired by real life historical events it is.

God, I longed for Gardens of the Moon while reading this.

I am going to attempt to read Memories of Ice but after a break to reset my brain on some books more to my taste! I honestly do not know what to expect from that one. I’ve been told it’s a return to characters from the first book, which will be nice but I’ve read that the first book is the least “Malazan” one of the series so if that’s the only one I’ve liked I’m worried! But I give myself permission to DNF that one!