It's impossible to describe this series, except to say that Erikson manages to throw together hundreds of characters, gods, myths, the history of millennia, giant battles, betrayals, etc. etc. into one series and make it work.
It's in trying to put the ingredients together of a character who's finally pushed so far.
And certainly The Last Pier, set in a crumbling mansion house in Bly, Suffolk, in the summer of 1939, brings together a group of characters – servants as well as masters – under one roof.
In many ways, Zodiac is Fincher's version of All the President's Men - a tapestry of complex events stitched together by dozens of characters, in a procedural format, and hung against the backdrop of a newsroom.
Mr. Maupin's books are densely plotted, with the storylines cleverly weaving together the fates of characters from different social spheres: the advertising magnate Edgar Halcyon, dying of cancer, strikes up an unlikely romance with Anna Madrigal, even as his son-in-law, Beauchamp, dallies with Mary Ann, etc.
But he ropes together a cast of characters united only in their having been born more or less between 1940 and 1955, in having chosen to pursue a profession that involves standing on stage and trying to make an audience laugh, and in having achieved a degree of success in doing so.
Mr. Stubblefield's computer did not try to enter the network or to make itself known in any way while collecting the necessary data to divine the key to the network: it just listened, and pieced together the string of characters necessary to gain full access.
It brought together a cast of characters, the like of which had not been seen since the days of Britain's imperial glory.
There's a metagame element as well — you'll need to put together your team of characters as you can swap between multiple characters in the middle of a match.
