Glen Cook, The Black Company

I became acquainted with Glen Cook’s work quite a long time ago, but, as it turned out, through the back gate: I swallowed his entire series about detective Garrett and was very pleased with it. It made a pretty strong impression on me, but ended indecently quickly. And recently a desire ripened in me to get acquainted with the rest of the author’s work, and the choice fell on The Black Company. At first I did not like the book. Cook’s style is characterized by spare strokes, a minimum of unnecessary descriptions, but immediately a lot of action and characters. And on my side there were desperate attempts to understand who is who, who stands behind which nickname, and what relation they have to the main character. But after just a couple of chapters it became hard for me to tear myself away from reading: a dense, gloomy atmosphere was taking shape, and from fragmentary details, sparsely scattered through the lines, characters began to appear, each one more beautiful and charismatic than the last. The universe of The Black Company is unlike what I had seen in fantasy before. There is no excessive, eye-gouging nobility and pathos here, but the good that appears in these people is much more valuable. And the fact that they fight on the side of an evil sorceress says nothing against The Black Company, because the other side is no prettier.