Deadhouse Gates

[lightreads]

Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Epic fantasy. Eeepic. I knew I wasn't doing this book any favors when I cued up the audio to go with my 200 sit-ups workouts, and indeed I did find myself halfway through being all, inhale, up, hold, exhale, down, inha—hey, who's this guy again? What side is he on? . . . Whose army of the apocalypse?.

But it was a positive in the end, because it turns out the only thing this series really has going for it is plot. It's a positive, just stay with me. Because when you can come off a distracted reading like that, and the last hundred pages still knock your socks off with the assassination and politics and gods and slaughtered POW's and, you know, stuff, it's doing the plot right.

I do have to stop a moment to make fun of everything else, though. Like how every soldier is also a philosopher:

The captain sighed after a moment, hastily completing the task. "Do you find the need to answer all this, Historian?" he asked. "All those tomes you've read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we've seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?"

A soldier-philosopher barely staying afloat in freshman composition, I should say. The number of times I snortgiggled, I can't even tell you.

But the point. The point is I liked it anyway, you see, because it has gobs of plot, and sometimes that's all she really ordered, you know?

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