I got to know Glen Cook’s work a long time ago, though, as it turned out, through the side door: I devoured his entire Garrett detective series and enjoyed every bit of it. It left quite an impression, but I ran out of books far too soon. Recently I finally felt like exploring the rest of what he has written, and I settled on The Black Company.
At first I did not like it. Cook paints in sparse strokes: hardly any description, but plenty of action and a crowd of characters from page one. I spent the opening chapters desperately trying to work out who was who, which nickname belonged to whom, and how any of them related to the main character. A couple of chapters in, though, I could hardly put the book down. A dense, gloomy atmosphere took shape, and out of fragmentary details scattered sparingly across the pages the characters emerged, each more vivid and charismatic than the last.
The world of The Black Company is unlike anything I had seen in fantasy before. There is no overblown, garish nobility or pathos here, and the goodness that does surface in these people is worth all the more for it. And the fact that they fight on the side of an evil sorceress says nothing against the Company, because the other side is no prettier.
