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Review: The Black Company and Shadows Linger by Glen Cook
Steven Erikson, who is one of my favorite epic fantasy writers, dedicated one of his books to Glen Cook and I'd heard that Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series drew some inspiration from Cook's Black Company novels, so I wanted to check it out. These novels tell the story of The Black Company, a mercenary army in a fantasy world. They find themselves in the service of a prototypical "bad guy," the Lady and her minions, The Taken. However, the world in which The Black Company does its work is far less black and white than your average fantasy novel. The good guys, the Rebels fighting against the evil Lady, themselves commit atrocities as bad as the Lady's forces. Questions of morality aren't completely thrown aside, but they tend to be gray rather than black and white.
All in all, these are pretty good stories. Shadows Linger, I thought, was stronger than The Black Company: Cook worked to do some interesting things with story-telling. In both cases, he throws in some twists and turns. These novels were both written in the '80s and something about the style hearkens back to an earlier time in fantasy writing. In fact, I found it hard to get into at first, but once I did I enjoyed it well enough. In some ways, I think I enjoyed the ideas in the book more than the execution of it. Still, I say that, but I'll very likely invest more time in reading further volumes in the series. FYI, the first three books (these two plus the third) are collected in an omnibus edition.