The most honest description I read of starting this series was someone saying it felt like being thrown into the deep end of a very, very deep pool and held under, and that’s not a complaint, that’s exactly the deal Erikson is offering you. Gods, races, a decade-deep political history, all of it gets dropped on you unexplained from page one, and you either surrender to reconstructing it from context the way you’d piece together a language you don’t speak, or you bounce off hard, and plenty of people bounce off hard.
I didn’t. I read the first two hundred pages with almost no idea what was happening and kept going anyway, and somewhere around the point where the pieces started clicking I understood why people compare this to Glen Cook’s Black Company, that same sense of soldiers as the actual protagonists of an epic rather than chosen ones, mud-level and mythic at once. One reviewer’s entire review was three words, one name, Gruntle, nuff said, and I laughed because I got there too, this series builds attachment to side characters most books wouldn’t bother naming.
It’s not for everyone and I won’t pretend otherwise. Someone compared it to Batman v Superman, said it’s not really a story so much as a bunch of scenes set in the same world, and there’s a version of that criticism I understand, the structure resists the shape most fantasy trains you to expect, payoff doesn’t always arrive when or how you’d want. But that’s also what makes the parts that do land hit so much harder, because Erikson never once holds your hand into feeling something, you have to earn the emotional beats the same way you earn understanding the plot.
People reread this series once a year for the better part of a decade and I understand the instinct even having only made it through the first two books so far. It’s dense, occasionally maddening, and unlike almost anything else I’ve read in the genre.