Pieces on Speculative Fiction

2 stars out of 5. This is decent first novel by Ian C. Esslemont. It tells the story of how Emperor Kellanved and his companion Dancer return to Malaz Island as it is the Shadow night, when the realm of Shadow and mortals are as one. The story has a feel of a short story that has been buffed to novel length. Recommended for the readers of Steven Erikson’s Malazan stories, others won’t probably get everything and the story is pretty thin and infodumps too frequent.

The world of this book was created by Steven Erikson and Esslemont in the eighties and they both write books in it. Erikson has so far written 7 novels and 3 novellas, this is Esslemont’s first effort in their shared world. All this means that there are a lot of things in the book that you don’t really fully understand, unless you have read Erikson’s work. Night of Knives doesn’t work too well on it’s own.

There are two protagonists, Kisla, a girl who is interested in joining the Claw, Malazan Empire’s covert operations unit and Temper, former member of Dassem Ultor’s Sword. Kisla comes of as whiny teen, which isn’t very exciting or interesting. Temper on the other hand is pretty typical grizzly veteran, who is rather good at what he does. As neither one is very character to the story and the events happening during the Shadow night, they aren’t exactly the most interesting choices as point of view characters.

As usual in all Malazan novels, there is here a convergence taking place. Dangerous and powerful individuals and groups are interested using the Shadow night for their own uses. As a backdrop the Storm Riders are riding down the defenses of Malaz Island.

The whole story covers only the Shadow night, so the scale is quite from Erikson’s novels. The style is somewhat different and I feel that Esslemont describes occasionally a lot more and too much and you’re left with the feeling that this book would have worked a lot better in novella length.

Tags Ian C. Esslemont, Malazan, Night of Knives

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 12:32 am by Illotus . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.