For all sort of reasons, I'm still no very far along in MBotF (book 4, I was forced to abandon last year for lack of time to read it fast enough, but I'm getting back to it soon... after starting all over again). I really enjoyed books 2-3, especially the ending of the chain of dogs that convinced me to go on with the series. The setting is fun, the tone is fun. I'm pretty sure one day I'll finish all the books.

But GotM... even re reading it after MoI, which gave me a lot more context..

I rarely had that much trouble getting into the first book of a series (EOTW would be a very distant second, and for totally opposite reasons) - I ended up reading the beginning 5-6 times and parts of the second half 3 times before I've finished it (many years later... heck, I even had time to lose my first copy of the book), and I've stopped blaming my lack of patience and blame Erikson's storytelling skills and choices for that. My impression is that this book is well loved, in retrospect or not, mostly by people who have persevered and got enthralled by the series (whether they got gripped by books 2-3 or liked GotM itself) and now understand what is going on, but my guess is that with GotM, Erikson lost even more of his potential readership than he's managed to get to follow him. He may have achieved pretty much the same goals with his series but got himself a vaster readership had he thought out a better introduction to his series (not that I say Erikson isn't widely read, but that he probably managed to get just a fraction of the readership the quality of his series ought to have gotten him)

It's not a terrible book at all, but it's not a good introductory novel/first act either, and that's why it half fails in my view. The prose is OK, the pacing fits the story, the characterization is ok but a bit tainted by Erikson's background in RPG - but that gets much better by book 2 (3 for the other players) as the characters became more something you expect to find in a novel, not a RPG (as if as he gained experience as a novelist Erikson developped a better sense of the differences there should be between good campaign characters vs. good novel characters).

The main problem I have with GotM is that Erikson's in medias res technique just isn't very good or well-balanced. Nothing wrong with the basic concept, but the execution is bad, over the top. The first part of the novel, before Darujhistan, is possibly the most boring and self-indulgent "prologue" I've read. It's crammed with details, inner monologues or dialogue, vague or totally unexplained references to events and magical concepts, esoteric cosmology which are of strictly no interest for their total lack of context and proper exposition as they unfold. At first you try to concentrate and absorb as much as you can, expecting this to become relevant and illuminated later in the novel, but after a while you understand it won't. By the time all this information becomes relevant (and then it's interesting and well-conceived and all), it's long forgotten. You catch all this back on rereads (which in a sense made the first reading totally useless), and you feel like you've read that part of the story at the wrong time.... I know this is "intentional", and in Erickson's eyes this probably achieves exactly what he sought to accomplish, but it's his intent that is a questionable writing choice in the first place. Whatever the intent, it feels like the work of a novelist who had no good idea how to provide a proper introduction to his world and story (e.g. he wasn't happy with starting his Darujhistan story more slowly, with writing devices for some exposition about the Malazan campaign, the magic, the cosmology etc.), and so instead indulged himself by opening with a long section of story that doesn't belong to the beginning of the novel (at least in full narrative form) and interested primarly the writer himself (and his friends familiar with his campaign world) at that point. It feels pretty much like a bunch of experienced RPG players with a mean streak invited a slightly younger guy to join them but when you get to their place on friday night you're snobbed and told the campaign has long been going and no one in the room cares to introduce you to the game and rules - "you're late mate" - so you'll go sit in the back (don't you dare even try to take a look at the map... all the characters know the geography and speak as if you should, but you'll have to catch up on your own) and watch and listen to the grown-ups playing - no question asked. If you don't fall asleep, if you manage to catch up, maybe in a while we might let you do more than sit in the room with us. And oh, don't touch our beer - the seven-up is in the fridge.

What makes it feel especially self-indulgent is that the second half of the novel is your fairly standard Fantasy series opening, with its barely disguised "young apprentices" being the pawns of greater powers (the urban rather than usual countryside version, but that's it - except Erikson just can't write young people like young people and while he insists on having them in there but he constantly comes up with cheats or devices to justify his 12, 15, 19 years old to think and act much older), its mentors, classic creatures like the devilish big black dogs, a unity of time and location for the main plot etc. but instead of focussing a much shorter introductory novel on that material - which wouldn't have let him play in his advanced playground before future books, Erickson had this 200 pages of prologue/backstory (that might have worked better in book 3) crammed with stuff the readers weren't ready for but must plow through. Or perhaps it was the "standard fare" Darhujistan story that wasn't a good choice and got in the way of a more proper introduction to the Malazan campaign story line.

The worst is perhaps that after introducing you the hard way to this continent, story line and players, Erikson then completely abandonned it to give us a second, this time far more achieved, original and interesting, introductory novel to another story line (which reworked a bit could have been an excellent book 1). Then the whole "in media res" concept starts feeling more and more like an excuse for the fact Erikson as a novelist doesn't master well the art and rules of properly beginning his stories, that he's used to develop campaigns, rules, settings and characters and get into them through discussions and debates before jumping in the thick of things with the game. In novel form, you jump in at the same place, but you get none of the campaign background/explanations. You're supposed to play those advanced characters in a complex campaign, but the DM gave you none of the background and rules.

Obviously that worked for some people and a lot of people went along and on to the other books, but it's very significant that so many readers advise people to start with book 2, or book 3, or read book 3 after book 1. As an introductory novel to draw you into a complex series, GotM mostly fails to do its job, breaking way too many of the rules of a good first act (or basic novel writing). So, it's a concept and it follows that concept... but that's not enough to make it good storytelling technique. The question is more whether breaking all those rules of storytelling was such a good idea in the first place. Perhaps Erikson's choices get justified by mid-series or later, but after 3.5 books, I still don't feel it was a good choice. It's kind of the antithesis to "openers" like EOTW. Jordan gave you about 30% of the exposition/concepts/developments the reader could have absorbed in a book that long, while Erikson put over 30% too much of those in GotM, essentially stuff that should either have taken the time to expose better right then and there, or else that should have waited for later books.

So all in all, GotM still feels to me like a book weakened by trying to get too fast to certain aspects of the story, and by trying to include too much that didn't really belong in there. About a third into the series, it feels more and more promising and high quality, but it had a very weak beginning. Weak enough that if I wasn't regularly on a forum like this one and people had not convinced me to persevere (with the occasional suggestion to move on to DGH and return to read GOTM after I really got into the series...) I seriously doubt I would ever have discovered with the later books that the series is quite good and fascinating. I would rather have ended up in what I suspect is the large group of people who never got past GotM.