If you, like I, have more or less stumbled onto Steven Erikson's The Malazan Book of the Fallen, you are still going to be unprepared for The Lees of Laughter's End. I say this because Malazan is among the darkest of the noir fantasy tradition, and although this novella occupies the same universe, I can only call it slapstick comedy of a particularly ghoulish sort.

The Suncurl is on her way from Theft to the southern coast of Genabackis, having most recently made port at Lamentable Moll. Captain Sater is not really a sea captain, and those of her crew who came aboard with her are not sailors -- they are runaway mercenary soldiers who found it expedient to depart from Theft with something more than due haste. The ship carries passengers, the sorcerer Bauchelain, his companion the eunuch necromancer Korbal Broach, and their serving man, Emancipor Reese, who is known to a number of the crew as "Mancie the Unlucky" for his previous career on the sea. The ship has entered the Red Road of Laughter's End, a treacherous stretch of the sea lanes, followed by a veritable herd of sharks, along with dhenrabi (which are much larger and even less reasonable) on their way to their breeding grounds. And it seems that Korbal Broach, in pursuit of his latest project (which may have something to do with the locked and warded chest in his quarters that contains his "child"), has been doing some ill-advised fishing, for which he decides he needs bloodier bait.

And then things go straight to hell.

Korbal Broach and Bauchelain are probably the most completely amoral characters I have ever run across, at least in literature. I don't think I'm going out on a limb at all by classifying them as certifiable psychopaths. Start with them and a crew that, in general, are strangers to honesty, not to mention physical courage, mix in some supernatural contraband and a god in pursuit of what's rightfully his, and you have a blend that needs only Erikson's offhand revelations of the bizarre and horrific to wind up with a story that first, sucks you right in and second, doesn't let up long enough for you to think about it.

The most remarkable thing (or actually, one of them) is that Erikson can pack that much sensation into a mere hundred-plus pages. Those who've encountered Malazan know that he can keep a 900-page narrative flowing smoothly and engagingly enough that it's hard to put down. His books are rich, detailed (although not smotheringly so), cryptic and strange. The fact that he's managed these same characteristics in a short book with no sense of crowding and no sense of anything being truncated is testament to his facility as a writer.

I do have the usual grumble: this is the middle book of a trilogy. Now I have to go find the other two.

The most up-to-date site on Steven Erikson is the fan site at Malazan Empire. Tor is here.