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Glen Cook

Andrea Blendl

Chronicles of the Black Company Paperback – November 13, 2007

by Glen Cook (Author)

1,200 ratings

Book 1 of 4: Chronicles of the Black Company

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Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead.

Then comes the prophecy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more…

This omnibus edition comprises The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose―the first three novels in Glen Cook's bestselling fantasy series.

Print length

704 pages
Language

English
Publication date

November 13, 2007
Dimensions

6.23 x 1.31 x 9.21 inches
ISBN-10

0765319233
ISBN-13

978-0765319234
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.
244 Kindle readers highlighted this
There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.
218 Kindle readers highlighted this
I am haunted by the clear knowledge that, in the end, evil always triumphs.
174 Kindle readers highlighted this

Editorial Reviews

Review

“With the Black Company series Glen Cook single-handedly changed the face of fantasy--something a lot of people didn't notice and maybe still don't. He brought the story down to a human level, dispensing with the cliché archetypes of princes, kings, and evil sorcerers. Reading his stuff was like reading Vietnam War fiction on peyote.” ―Steven Erikson, author of Gardens of the Moon

About the Author

Born in 1944, Glen Cook grew up in northern California, served in the U.S. Navy, attended the University of Missouri, and was one of the earliest graduates of the well-known "Clarion" workshop SF writers. Since 1971 he has published a large number of Science Fiction and fantasy novels, including the "Dread Empire" series, the occult-detective "Garrett" novels, and the very popular "Black Company" sequence that began with the publication of The Black Company in 1984. Among his science fiction novels is A Passage at Arms.

After working many years for General Motors, Cook now writes full-time. He lives near St. Louis, Missouri, with his wife Carol.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books; First edition (November 13, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 704 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0765319233
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0765319234
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.23 x 1.31 x 9.21 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #43,896 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #208 in Military Fantasy (Books)
- #802 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #939 in Dark Fantasy

Customer Reviews:
1,200 ratings

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Glen Cook

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Glen Charles Cook (born July 9, 1944) is a contemporary American science fiction and fantasy writer, best known for The Black Company fantasy series.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Harmonia Amanda (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

5 star		75%
4 star		16%
3 star		6%
2 star		1%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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JustADude

Kindle users get a sample first

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2019

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The significant majority of the one and two star reviews say the same basic thing - i.e. that the writing is so bad that the books are unreadable. I agree with all of those reviewers. I would fail a writing student that turned in anything even remotely like this and encourage them to find a career that minimizes the need to write; or really to communicate at all.

Having said that, there are also hundreds of four & five star reviews and the overall rating for the book, at the time of this review, was a healthy 4.5 stars. I suspect that the odd writing style that is so off-putting to many of us does not bother many others. Some people might even like it (which I really find hard to believe; but it's certainly possible).

If you have a Kindle, the easy answer is to download the sample and read that before you buy. If you can deal with the odd writing style in the sample, it's probably worth buying the book and giving it a shot. If, instead, the writing style effects you like it did me (roughly along the lines of fingernails on a chalkboard), you can get out before you've spent any money.

42 people found this helpful

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M. A. Lewandowski

and *gasp* imagine for themselves what something looked like exactly. If you have an active imagination

Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2015

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Classic sci-fi/fantasy literature. The writing style can be a bit off-putting, as it is not heavy on description. Cook leaves it to the reader to let the imagination fill in details, and *gasp* imagine for themselves what something looked like exactly. If you have an active imagination, you'll probably love this. It's NOT George R.R. Martin filled with endless, on-going descriptions of every nitpick detail. In that same vein, it is not Tolkien, with some great explanation as to how things came to be. Instead, you're thrust into things riding in the hip pocket of a "combat medic", and how he sees things as he attempts to chronicle his unit's actions, and how he becomes engrossed in a world that he never expected to find himself plunged into.

The first part reads like a war diary (which, it kind of is) in a medieval "Vietnam". The "good guys" are hardly good, the "bad guys" are not all that bad, most of the time. He approaches his fantasy world in varying shades of grey, with true light/darkness being very, very rare. War is pictured as the ugly, dirty thing that it truly is (former combat medic myself... so maybe I'm biased), with all of the moral ambiguity and heartache that can accompany it. There's no sex scenes but there's some discussion of the things men historically have done in war as conquerors. The ugly side of human nature isn't overly dramatized as Martin tends to do..... but the author does not shy away from it either.

My best recommendation to a reader new to it is.... start reading, and don't give up for at least 10 chapters. Admittedly, I passed up this book several times before my friend convinced me to really try it. I started it, got about 10% in...... and was firmly hooked to the point of staying up waaaaaaaaaaaay too late on worknights.

55 people found this helpful

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Jong S. Rho

Still holds up after all this time

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2019

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I first started reading Glen Cook back in the 70's when the first Dread Empire book was released and continued with his Black Company novels when they started being released in the mid 1980's. However with the delays in the release of Glittering Stone and RL intervening, my consumption of not only Glen Cook, but all authors, nose-dived. However now that I am in retirement, I've started picking up books that I liked back in the 70's and 80's. Most have been disappointments since I guess my tastes have matured. However, the Black Company books are some of the exceptions to that as they have held up remarkably well. If you are a fan of the genre known as GrimDark, then you should be aware that Glen Cook was the progenitor. He may be better known these days as the author of the Garrett PI series, which is much lighter, but to me his best works are his earliest.

10 people found this helpful

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Remo Williams

Best dark fantasy I've read in years

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2020

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No idea how i never knew about this series until now.
Captivating story. Not sure where the story will continue from here but I'm definitely going to buy the next compilation to find out.
Overall it's kind of difficult to review Mr Cooks writing style. He has a very basic style of writing. There isn't much in the way of character development with any of the characters. He's also not very good at describing battles, which is why i think there's much less fighting than you'd think there would be in this genre of tales. What i did find interesting was the most enjoyable parts of these books were concerning side character storylines of individuals not in the Black Company. Those two character's tales were very well written.

6 people found this helpful

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Rich Fish

Page turning gritty fantasy with a unique scale and scope

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2017

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Cook paints with a human brush, characters have a feel of real people capable of failure and epic heroics that we can bond with.
Not a typical evil is evil and good is good epic, human failings are real, and integrating that makes the characters that much more realistic and relatable.
Conflict is not only on the battle fields,the subtle conflict in the hearts of the main characters as they struggle to understand what is truly right keeps them fresh and unpredictable in the long run. The lack of a stylish "beautiful" fantasy world gives the tale it's gritty reality but paints a world with no less depth than other popular fantasy works. The mercenary outlook and toned down "Magical" element give the story a human feel that latches on and makes it hard to put this book down. Should be part of any action/military/fantasy readers collection!

17 people found this helpful

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Jeff Childers

One of my favorite series and authors

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2020

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I love Glen Cook as an author. He is one of my all-time favorites. Black Company is dense, complex and the characters reflect that approach. This series was the first step down the evolutionary path that led from LOTR to Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones. Read it if you are a fan of these series.

For those that discover Glen Cook, also look at his Garrett series. It is a completely different beast from the Black Company or Instrumentalities series. It is funny, well paced, and the characters are interesting. This is what impresses me about Cook as an author. The ability to write these different kinds of stories, delivering at this level of quality.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Tiny Salvador

This is a review of the Kindle Edition, not the novels themselves.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 2, 2018

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The novels are great. My enjoyment of them was not what it should have been because of the quality of the edition.
This reads like a text that was scanned and not checked by a human before publishing. There are sentences ending with a comma, "l"s where "i"s or "J"s should be, uncapitalised proper nouns, whole words words separated by hyphens. The assortment of typos and errors is such and so constant that this Kindle edition should just be withdrawn until it's properly revised. By a professional. A human one.
The excellence or the writing does not deserve the callousness of this Kindle Edition.

26 people found this helpful

djr1979

Disappointing in the extreme

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 1, 2019

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This was a great disappointment considering all the hype that surrounded the series. I am genuinely surprised by the reviews and synopsis liking this work to Steven Erickson and Joe Abercrombie. For me, there just is no comparison.

The story is told from the point of view of Croaker, the company medic and historian. He gives no descriptions of the other members of the company outside of a few name drops. The characters appear almost as cardboard cutouts that are being moved around the scenery. They have no discernible personalities and the dialogue between them is painful to read. The story lacks any sense of a plot or indeed a feeling of impending doom. It just offers nothing of interest. This is culminated by the writer’s ability to build towards a battle scene and then completely skip the action to bring you swiftly back to the monotonous dialogue that I mentioned earlier.
I gave up on this book after only seventy pages so it is possible that it improves after that but I didn’t find anything about it interesting enough to justify spending any more time on.
I would not recommend this to anyone.

8 people found this helpful

Alistair

Recommended

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 14, 2018

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Never been a huge reader of fantasy, but when I decided to give another series a go, I am glad I picked this one. Not what I would call the "usual" fantasy structure, just a group of ruthless yet likable privateers who embark on their latest contract. This is where it all kicks off and I would recommend buying this collection, the first three novels in the series, as buying individually is way more harder and expensive.

3 people found this helpful

Mr. T. Stacey

Bad Company, I can't deny. Bad, bad company, 'til the day I die...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2014

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I picked this up after a recommendation from Steven Erikson (author of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series) and found it not only met all expectations, but (in my humble opinion) surpassed anything that Mr Erikson has ever written by a long shot.

Ok, so it's not nearly as ambitious and expansive as the Malazan world, nor is it chock-full of philosophical insights. But it has great characterisation (that Erikson sometimes struggles with) and spins a damn good yarn without overwhelming us with description or extremely confusing storylines. Not that I don't enjoy Erikson - he just has a habit of going off on a tangent for hundreds of pages before actually progressing the story!

Anyway, here are some of the things I liked about this trilogy:

> The aforementioned great characterisation - morally ambiguous characters unrestricted by good guy/bad guy tropes. Especially good old cynical Croaker, who narrates this tale with surprising honesty, particularly when it comes to the motivations of his comrades serving with him in the Black Company, some of which are not very nice!
> A Dark world with equally dark humour - a gritty, realistic world which, despite its grimness, provides many laugh out loud moments that gives the reader a nice break between the epic battles and general despair.
> Glen Cooks willingness to take risks - rather than play it safe and stick to the same formula of the first book (each chapter detailing a mission, with an overarching story developing throughout) Cook decides to shake things up by sacking that formula completely and adding an additional 3rd person POV independent of Croaker, but interrelated with the rest of the story. In addition, Cook is more than willing to unceremoniously kill off major characters in the blink of an eyelid. There are no heroic deaths in these books.

It is a crime that these books are not given the recognition they deserve. Especially considering they were released in the 80's, a period infested with Tolkien clones and the like. A must buy if you like GRRM, Abercrombie, Lynch or Erikson. Gritty fantasy at its grittiest. The revolution in fantasy that no one noticed.

6 people found this helpful

Peter Kirby

Atrocious, painfully cliched and barely literate.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2020

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The worst written book I've ever had the misfortune of partially reading. If you like a total absence of scene and character description, a blank nothing of a narrator and sentence construction so jarringly short it feels like the writer is firing uninformative bullets at you then this is your book. It's almost as if the man is allergic to commas and semi colons, it reads like he bullet pointed the storyboard and just slapped it in a cover. All settings and characters remain paper thin, major events occur offscreen and the focus of the book appears to be a fanatical obsession with card games.

Absolute 1/10 regret wasting a couple of hours of my life trying to get into it.

Shipping and physical product were fine.

One person found this helpful

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