The Crippled God

About The Crippled God

The Bonehunters' march ends here, the gods make their final moves, and the question that has been building across ten volumes of Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen — what does it mean to redeem a fallen god, and whether any group of mortals can pay the cost without being destroyed by it — arrives at an answer that has divided readers and made the series impossible to forget. The Crippled God is the tenth and final volume in the Malazan series, and it fulfills the structure Erikson has been building since Gardens of the Moon: the Fallen One, a god shattered and chained by other gods at the series' beginning, is the spiritual center of the entire ten-book arc, and Tavore's long-cryptic mission turns out to have been aimed at his redemption all along. The casualties in The Crippled God are real and numerous, and Erikson handles them with the respect the series has always extended to soldiers and ordinary people who carry impossible things without complaint. The climax involves every major storyline the series has developed — the Bonehunters, the K'Chain Che'Malle, Karsa Orlong, the surviving Bridgeburners, the Tiste Andii — converging in a sequence that is simultaneously the largest in scale and the most intimate in emotional register the series has produced. Erikson's prose reaches its most overtly philosophical here, which will either move readers deeply or test their patience depending on their tolerance for the elegiac, meaning-making register he has been building toward. The Crippled God is not a comfortable ending — Erikson is not interested in comfort, and his version of resolution requires something closer to witness than triumph — but it is a serious one, and for readers who have made the full journey, it stands as one of the most affecting conclusions in epic fantasy.

Tropes & Themes