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Malazan Book of the Fallen is a 10-volume fantasy series by Canadian author Steven Erikson.

Each of these 10 novels has about 1000 pages, and reading them is similar to the nature of certain street drugs – great in the beginning, but things end badly.

The first five books are a complex and compelling story, well-written and exciting. But the next five are a self-indulgent stew of introspective whining and endless internal monologues decrying religion and civilization. I only kept reading for the unresolved subplots, but that was a mistake because nothing got resolved, and the writing kept circling the drain.

No one stays bad; all the rogues are eventually resurrected as misunderstood good people. People die, but not really – they keep returning again and again until they become so tiresome that you’d kill them yourself if you could.

You don’t expect tough guys to whimper and whine, because, well, they’re tough guys. But here the warriors suddenly break character and weep and bemoan stuff even I wouldn’t complain about. And I complain about almost everything.

And don’t get me started on the people who know what’s really going on but won’t share it with anyone, no matter how much the others beg them to know, even when it means that their unexplained silence will kill them all. Just because.

I like stories with dark edges, but the words “grief” and “despair” appear so often in the last book that I was tempted to contact the author to see if he was OK.

Maybe Erikson should have quit halfway through the series and abandoned his readers, like George R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss did when they ran out of ideas or energy or both.