Now what do you suppose that means? I started Inda yesterday after finishing C. J. Cherryh's Betrayer and Martin O'Brien's Jacquot and the Waterman. After finally deciding, on p. 380-something of Deadhouse Gates truly means 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.' What a bunch of tripe.
Here is some stuff I wrote to a friend about that sad and sorry series:
Erikson - you can skim, as none of it makes sense anyway. I've now read a lot of reviews and two things are fairly remarkable: 1)everyone says it's too jumbled to follow, has too many characters - who can remember 3 books later who is a character he spent a paragraph on in book 1? A couple said his magic systems are arbitrary (one called them deus ex machina) and contradict each other. And 2) NO ONE MENTIONS the APPALLING violence.
A few things that I found 'memorable' -
A god that giggles as he takes possession of a young girl and turns her into an assassin.
The endless battlefields with blood, body parts, skulls, and one that was the remains of people eaten by the huge hounds of hell? Hounds of something. Earth roiling to spit out thousands on thousands of dead. Apparently this fighting has been going on for eons.
A ritual for Hood (god of death) that involved a priest covering himself with the blood of murderers that was collected in amphora so that huge swarms of flies covered him, and then all flew away revealing - ta da! - nothing. The priest had disappeared.
A young girl being raped over and over.
And a battlefield with corpses of men who'd been gutted, their women raped and then strangled with their entrails and babies with crushed skulls or impaled on spears.
And this goes on and on and on and on. Bah.
One reviewer said, "This was written for a certain audience and it's not me."
Well said, well said.
The complexity is in the gazillions of people you have to keep track of and don't give a fig about. Intellectually complex? A reviewer of a later book complained about Erikson's 'preaching'. Maybe that's what they mean? Maybe there's some vague intellectual conceit behind all this? But in the end who cares?
One reviewer of The Crippled God said Huh? That's it? And seemingly this is a reviewer for some website or other who's been following the series.
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