Malazan: Night of Knives by: Ian C. Esslemont

 

As someone who loves Doctor Who novels, reading a series written by multiple authors is not something that I am unfamiliar with or even against.  If you’re trying to write a big enough story and have a world you’ve created with others, you have every right to let others write in your world.  Steven Erikson’s Malazan: Book of the Fallen is a series where from the first book Ian C. Esslemont has had a hand in developments.  Esslemont cocreated the world with Erikson in 1982, and was acknowledged in Gardens of the Moon.  It would not be until 2004, after six books in Malazan: Book of the Fallen had been published when Esslemont had time to write and release the first in his six novel Novels of the Malazan Empire series.  Night of Knives is an incredibly short novel, only coming in at about 280 pages, serves as a companion to Gardens of the Moon and is one of the few novels which can be read out of sequence (I’m reviewing this having not read anything other than Gardens of the Moon).  It is marketed as the story of what happened to Emperor Kellanved and Dancer in between the prologue and first chapter of Gardens of the Moon, and while that is a thing that indeed happens in this book, it isn’t really the primary focus.  Esslemont instead focuses on the events surrounding these characters’ last 24-hours before all hell breaks loose and the pair are assassinated.  This being Malazan that is something that doesn’t happen as the first book implies, and Esslemont reveals several things about these characters which are excellently handled (especially in the short epilogue).

 

The actual focus of the book are two characters trying to survive the night in their respective plotlines.  Temper is an elderly bodyguard who arrives to Malaz City on a ship and is trying to go into hiding whilst Kiska is a teenager who wishes to become a mage.  As the main points of view of the novel, Temper and Kiska are where Night of Knives falls apart quite a bit.  Temper is a bit bland overall, though a serviceable character when you actually get into his actions and plotline there is a lot of interesting set pieces Esslemont understands.  Kiska, on the other hand, suffers from having a poor introduction as an angsty teenager who just wants to be a mage and honestly could be the protagonist of a Young Adult novel.  In fact, if it wasn’t for the horrors of the book, Night of Knives could easily be a YA novel in a lot of ways.  Kiska undergoes a journey of self-discovery and finds someone to train her to become a mage in this story.  Through the night she is chased by evil and finds people to help her and guide her to her final destination as she shifts in and out of the realm of Shadows.  Kiska’s biggest problem, however, is that Esslemont writes her character as a bratty teenager who the world just doesn’t get which feels really out of place with the rest of the novel’s tone.  She’s not a bad character, and once the plot gets going there’s quite a lot to enjoy about her.  There’s an interesting voice and a real sense of wonder after things get going, and she reacts realistically to the things about her.

 

Where Night of Knives really shines is in its tone.  The book essentially becomes a gothic horror story where the dead rise and monsters stalk the land over the course of one night of horror.  Once the sun sets the reader is privy to the world turning into a living nightmare and massacre, and when it is eventually revealed in what the nightmare is in aid of, they reel back in horror.  The horror elements of this story are tense and amount to much more than just senseless violence and destruction.  Esslemont has a real skill in building suspense and providing frights to the audience.  There’s also major differences in Esslemont’s style in comparison to Erikson: Esslemont is more direct in his writing and less concerned with shrouding things in mystery.  There is the expectation that you understand how the world works, but Esslemont understands that with a shorter page count he has to get to the point.  It still has quite a few hallmarks of a first novel, as the book is choppy in places.  It takes Esslemont about two very long chapters to actually get things going and even when they do there are often points in the writing that are just poorly written.  Overall, Night of Knives is a mixed bag.  It does a lot of things right and is effective at expanding on some of the unexplained aspects of Gardens of the Moon, but Esslemont is clearly writing his first novel.  5/10.