Dust of Dreams

About Dust of Dreams

The Bonehunters are marching — they have been marching for what feels like the entire series, across a dying landscape toward a destination their Adjunct refuses to name — and the sense of doom accumulating around Tavore's army in this volume is the most powerful sustained atmosphere in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Dust of Dreams is the ninth volume in Steven Erikson's series and the first half of a two-part conclusion that reads as a single enormous book: it does not end, it simply stops at a moment of maximum tension designed to make The Crippled God feel like an immediate necessity rather than a delayed sequel. The novel follows multiple storylines converging toward the same catastrophic point: the last march of the Bonehunters, the K'Chain Che'Malle and their desperate final gambit for survival, Kalyth and the Mortal Sword, and the slow revelation of what the Crippled God actually is and why its suffering matters to the entire arc of the series. Erikson's handling of the Bonehunters in this volume is the fullest articulation of his sustained interest in what soldiers become through accumulated violence and institutional loyalty — these are people who have been tested past the point of ordinary endurance and have come out as something rarer than conventional heroes. The scenes of the army marching and talking among themselves, sharing dark humor and debating philosophy in impossible circumstances, are Erikson at his most genuinely human. The K'Chain Che'Malle storyline, which has operated at the margins of the series for several volumes, comes fully into focus here and reveals itself as one of the most emotionally resonant threads in the entire ten-book arc. Dust of Dreams requires a fully committed reader, but for those readers it is the series operating at its most ambitious and uncompromising scale.

Tropes & Themes