This book is part two in a series – I previously reviewed part one (The Gardens of the Moon).

In fact I barely need to write a review about this book. Everything I said about the first book, except my attempt at a plot summary, could be copied and pasted here and it would still be valid. Erikson is consistent in his style, to say the least. So read that linked post before you continue with this one.

Just like the previous book, this one has a whole bunch of plot threads that work around and between and across and into each other. There is an army protecting some tens of thousands of civilian refugees while they march across a hostile continent to a safe city. There is a group of people who flee from a slave camp, and end up in weird places on the way. There is another group trying to journey to the capital city to kill the empress. There are more wanderers (no one in this world seems to stay in one place!) trying to find some sort of important place for some sort of important reason, but this thread I didn’t manage to keep hold of, sorry. And then some more.

This time I found the book too much.

Too much complexity – I kept getting lost, this time. How did this bunch of people end up where they are, again? And remind me, what did these guys have to do with that thing?

Too much intensity. It’s like the book starts at fortissimo and then goes crescendo from there. When everything is at maximum volume, your ears start to hurt after a while, so what should be the real peaks pass almost unnoticed in the general noise.

Too much monotonous travelling. At times it feels like everybody is on their way somewhere, most of them across a desert landscape, and all Erikson can do is throw more complications in their way just so they don’t arrive too early and too easily. I found myself skipping pages because there was more dusty travelling along with ominous comments about upcoming troubles.

Too much death and darkness. An awful lot of people die in this book. And, as an Amazon reviewer points out, Erikson “rarely lets an opportunity to stop and fetishize a horror go past”. There’s torture and rape and murder left, right and center. It is a book about war, admittedly, but when people get slaughtered in the tens of thousands, you’ve passed some sort of limit. Was that really necessary? Well, perhaps it will turn out to be, in a later book. Right now it just felt awful. It doesn’t exactly entice me to pick up the next book in the series. However several reviewers say that book 3 is more like the first one so I think at some point I will, anyway.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris.

A good review, if you want more.