by Glen Cook (1944)
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Imagine slogging through the endless drizzle of the Forest of Cloud, your boots sinking into the muck as arrows whistle past and the Taken’s sorcery lights up the sky like fractured lightning. That’s where The Black Company grabs you by the throat—right in the fetid heart of a war no one asked for, chronicled by Croaker, the company’s weary surgeon and annalist, whose sardonic voice turns horror into black humor.
You follow these mercenaries, the last remnants of a once-mighty brotherhood, as they swear fealty to the Lady, that ice-eyed sorceress whose empire reeks of domination and decay. Croaker’s quill scratches out the truth: the petty squabbles between wizards like Soulcatcher and Whisper, the grotesque loyalty of One-Eye and Goblin with their endless pranks amid the carnage, the Captain’s grim resolve cracking under the weight of command. There’s the rush of the siege at Charm, where the Dominator’s shadow looms like a cancer, or the brutal clarity of a field surgery where Croaker stitches up his brothers while the world burns. Reading it feels like chain-smoking in a foxhole—grimy, exhilarating, laced with dread that coils in your gut because these aren’t heroes. They’re just men, flawed and fatalistic, questioning their dark masters only in whispers.
What sets this apart from the genre’s usual parade of farmboys-turned-kings? Cook drops you into the enlisted grunt’s boots, no prophecies or moral compasses, just survival in a world where power corrupts absolutely and loyalty is a sucker’s bet. It’s fantasy stripped bare, raw as a bayonet wound, inventing the military vein that pulses through everything grim afterward—think the sprawling chaos of Erikson’s Malazan or Abercrombie’s cynical crews, all owing their grit to this.
If you devoured the Imperial Warren’s madness in Malazan or rooted for Glokta’s venomous scheming in The Blade Itself, this is your origin story—the unvarnished blueprint that makes those later epics hit harder.
Grab The Black Company tonight, and by dawn, you’ll be one of the boys, wondering how deep the darkness goes.
Author portrait: Photo: Harmonia Amanda | License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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