Toll the Hounds

About Toll the Hounds

Darujhistan — the city that opened the Malazan Book of the Fallen in Gardens of the Moon — is hosting a gathering that will end in catastrophic violence, and Anomander Rake, the Son of Darkness, is moving toward a destiny he has chosen with full knowledge of what it requires. Toll the Hounds is the eighth volume in Steven Erikson's series, and it is the most elegiac: a long, deliberate approach to catastrophe filtered through multiple perspectives, written in a prose style more philosophical and meditative than anywhere else in the ten books. Some readers find Erikson's voice here too unhurried and abstract; others consider Toll the Hounds the series' peak, the volume where his ambitions as a novelist — not just as a world-builder — are most fully realized. A chapter narrated by Kruppe, a recurring character from Gardens of the Moon, demonstrates a formal range that most epic fantasy writers never attempt and few could sustain. Anomander Rake is the figure the series has been circling since the beginning: ancient beyond reckoning, powerful beyond measure, and possessed of a sorrow that has accumulated across so many millennia it has become something close to purpose. What he does in this volume, and why, is the resolution of a story that Erikson has been telling quietly in the background since Book One, and it is handled with appropriate gravity. The Bridgeburners return here in ways that require and reward the reader's memory of everything that happened to them across the previous seven volumes. Hood, the god of death and one of the series' most important background figures, receives his fullest treatment here. Toll the Hounds is not the place to start the Malazan series, but for readers who have earned their way to it, it reveals most clearly what Erikson set out to build.

Tropes & Themes