Toll the Hounds by Steven Erikson

Any avid reader of this series that gets thru book 7 doesn't need a good review to open book 8, you're hooked already and nothing ought to stop you from continuing. But for those both hooked and disappointed by degrading quality and increasing page numbers in the last few entries, i can say book 8 will assuage some of yours and my own fears.

Things are tightened up and kept on track. There’s a great deal less irrelevant, trite dialog. The stakes are continuing to expand in respect to the old gods and ancient pantheonic relationships and this is good. It’s still too long, but not by the exhaustive measure of recent entries. This one is pretty good and provides some great 'big story' revelations.

In fact, I think I was able to piece together the reasoning behind the split of mother dark from the andii and its connection to dragnipur and the battle between chaos and order. And it actually made sense! so anomander rake - who has a nice, large role in 'toll' - is incredibly important to the fabric of reality in the malazan world. More so than any elder god.

At any rate, things pick back up in 'toll' and you actually get some well-deserved answers. It’s not as good as book 1-4, but it's reassuring that Erikson is returning to form on the home stretch.

Few books have affeced my life quite so heavily as this, which after finishing had caused my sleep cycle to start at 7am.

Few series are truly deserving of the word 'Epic', and Erikson has easily achieved, if not surpassed its concept. His style and writing ability has grown from book to book, Toll the Hounds being his current greatest work.
Once again, we are subjected to a mass of characters, many we have not seen for 2 - 3 (and one who hadn't been in it since the first half of gardens of the moon) books, if we've even seen them at all, and even the new ones are interesting, even if they don't have as strong a place in your overcrowded heart.

Not only does this book build on the world it had created, it changes it. Erikson knows that the world changes, and its shown here with brutal force. Time is an onslaught, and it leaves little in its wake, even those who have stood its test of time.

Toll the Hounds end was quite frankly astonishing, I closed this book unable to believe what I had just read. The sheer scope and scale of this book dwarfs even his previous stories. It is grim, it is dark and it is at time depressing. But that is exactly what I like about this series. It feels real. No matter how unreal warrens, soletaken, D'Ivers and so on are, the characters, events and history all feels so real.

Of all my favourite fantasy series, I would hesitate in passing this onto other readers. It is hard, it is daunting, but I can without a doubt say this book, this series triumphs over all others.