Book Review: Chronicles of the Black Company

by Glenn Cook 4 of 5 Stars

This is a review of The Black Company omnibus, which contains the first three novels of the Black Company: The Black Company, Shadows Linger and the White Rose.

The first book of the Black Company sat on my bookshelf for nearly 15 years before I got to it. I had attempted to read the first book, with its compelling cover of a Darth Vader-like figure holding a knife and stabbing a table with a glowing pentagram on it, a couple of times. Glenn Cook’s writing style is not heavy on description or exposition and backstory. He just throws you into the story and you have to swim for a while before things start to make sense. Originally, this was very off putting and led me to reading a dozen pages before I put the book down. However, recently, I picked the book up with the intention of finishing it no matter what, and once I got past the initial disorientation and managed to get my footing in the story, I was extremely impressed.

So, be warned, Glenn Cook has a jarring storytelling style that requires a fair amount of patience. He has a spartan writing style. The sentences and paragraphs are not difficult; they’re lean. But his lack of description and exposition complicate comprehension of the story. Stick with it. Struggle through the first few chapters, and you’ll be rewarded with a compelling story that’s worth the time. The Black Company is a mercenary outfit with a history that dates back hundreds of years. They are unwittingly duped into serving The Lady, a cunning and diabolical sorceress, to put down a rebellion against her in a massive military campaign on a new continent. There is a lot of military fiction told from the gritty perspective of the soldiers on the ground.

In the first book, The Black Company, the story is told first-person from the perspective of Croaker, the Black Company’s annalist and physician. In later books, the narrative is split between third-person and Croaker’s first-person narrative.

That’s another thing to understand about the novels – none of the main characters have a real name. (This is in keeping with a general premise among the sorcerers and wizards of the book that to know someone’s true name is to have power of them.) So, you have characters like The Captain, the Lieutenant, Goblin, One-Eye, Darling, Raven, Soulcatcher, Bonegnasher, the Lady, the Dominator, Tracker, and (my personal favorite) Toadkiller Dog.

There’s a lot of great storytelling in the Black Company, although I would argue that my favorite of the series would be the second book, Shadows Linger. It’s an older fantasy novel (written in the 80s), and so it is absent a lot of the social narratives that have tainted fantasy and science fiction of late, and it definitely has the feel of fiction written in that era. The books are shorter than your typical fantasy novel, owing to Cook’s spartan writing style.

While it is not as graphic as Game of Thrones, there is no doubt that it has a dark and gritty feel. There are no explicit scenes of rape or torture, not much over the top vulgarity, but there is a definite feel of moral grayness, a bleakness to the storyline where the lines between good and evil, between the good guys in a war and the bad guys, cannot be adequately described.

There’s also an undercurrent of political machination that adds a complexity to the “villains” in the story. It’s an interesting play on politics that does not reach Game of Thrones levels, but may give you pause to consider whether similar intrigue might have played out among Sauron and his Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings.

This really was a delightful and compelling series to read and quite a surprise to me in the content and quality of the story being told. It probably should be held up as one of the modern classics of fantasy. Considering that it came out around the same time as Terry Books’ Shannara series and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, both of which are credited for breathing life back into Fantasy back in the 80s, I’d put Glenn Cook’s Black Company up there as well. He may not have been as popular as these other two, but I think there are seeds that were planted, a kind of pedigree, that show up in the works of George R.R. Martin (and the other gritty fantasy realists that have followed) and Stephen Erickson.