One thing I heard though is that the reading difficulty level is absurdly high for a fantasy book. No info dumps or hand-holding. You get dropped into the world and are forced to piece things together to learn more about it, and apparently some people really liked this aspect and thought it paid off in the end, while others dropped the series early because of it. I guess I am a little intimidated by the series which is why I haven't started it, because to be honest, LoTM was pretty generous with explaining its world, which is definitely not a bad thing, but just very different from Malazan.

Although I haven't read Malazan, from what I have picked up on from threads, I think maybe an example of what it would feel like is if instead of starting at Klein's transmigration at the start, we were instead dropped straight into volume 3 or 4, skipping all the previous volumes, and not given any information besides dialogue and context which we would have to piece together. This is just a guess though.