There is a saying in Darujhistan, the city of blue fire, that love and death shall arrive together, dancing...It is summer and the heat is oppressive. However the discomfiture of the small round man in the faded red waistcoat is not entirely due to the sun. Dire portents both plague his nights and haunt the city's streets like fiends of shadow. Assassins still skulk in alleyways, but the hunters have become the hunted. Hidden hands pluck the strings of tyranny like a fell chorus, and strangers have arrived. While the bards sing their tragic tales somewhere in the distance can be heard the baying of Hounds. All is palpably not well. And in Black Coral, where Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness rules, memories of ancient crimes are stirring, intent on revenge. Could it be that Love and Death are indeed about to arrive...hand in hand, and dancing? This new chapter in Erikson's monumental series is epic fantasy at its most imaginative and storytelling at its most exciting.
From an interview with Jeff VanderMeer on the Amazon Book blog:
I've just finished Toll the Hounds, which is the eighth novel in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. At the moment I am working on a co-written novella with Ian C. Esslemont set in the same world, and I confess I've started the prologue to the ninth in the series. As for Toll the Hounds, I guess I can say I'm pleased with the result; that's a statement that needs qualification, however. The novel is about love and grief, and integral to that exploration was my fair share of both this past year, as my father fell ill and in the course of four months withered away and died. There is something mercenary in writers, something that others might view with faint disgust, and that is the terrible desire to feed off one's own circumstances, using genuine emotions (including suffering) to infuse a fictional tale that is, at its core, meaningless. I don't mean that as a disparagement of fiction; as writers we play a game of illusion, pretending to a reality that does not exist, and if we can, we use that false reality to generate real emotion. And that's what can make a normal person understandably uneasy, as the writer guides that person into a very personal world; as, in this instance, I happen to be inviting him or her to share in my grief. Does all this stem from an overblown ego? I'm not sure; I feel pretty humble these days. At the same time there is an undeniable ego to the presumption of being writers: that we actually possess something worth saying, not to mention the conceit that words possess real efficacy (but those are topics for some other time). All that makes the novel sound like a downer, but while there are tragic elements to the tale, there are plenty of lighter ones, too. It's more like a wake. You get laughs, you get tears, and maybe when it's all said and done, you walk away thoughtful, standing in the afternoon light, saying goodbye to someone who is no longer there. As I did.
With each of these novels I work at finding something that sets it apart from the ones that came before, while remaining true to the spirit of the series. In the case of Toll the Hounds, that uniqueness was found in the narrative voice coming directly from a character that readers should know well by now. The risk is that those readers happen to be fairly split on whether they like the bloke or hate him, with equal amounts of passion. To those who happen to hate him, sorry for this, but: tough luck. It is what it is. As the eighth in a ten volume series, some pretty huge events occur by the book's end. According to my advance readers, there will be surprises--things no-one can anticipate (despite all my foreshadowing, which has been going on for seven books now), and for me that remains a measure of success. As to how the novel is received by the majority of my readers, that remains to be seen.
Edit 29 Feb: The prologue of the book is now up on MalazanEmpire.com. Read it here.
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