Will I love The Black Company?

In reading The Black Company, I felt like I was stumbling onto soldiers’ private journals.

No shining heroes, no noble speeches—just tired men doing dirty jobs for dirtier employers. What hooked me wasn’t the battles but the banter, the sense of weary camaraderie. Croaker’s perspective makes war almost intimate, showing us the quiet boredom between bursts of chaos. I loved how Cook doesn’t romanticize anything. Instead, he captures the confusion, cruelty, and humor of being part of something too big to fully grasp.

It’s fantasy that smells like mud, sweat, and campfire smoke.

I love old-school fantasy stories, and I absolutely ADORE this book (and the other books in the series) by Glen Cook.

This series follows a mercenary company in a magic-strewn fantasy world as they navigate contracts, supernatural enemies, and their own conflicts…mainly just trying to survive until the next day. It’s gritty, it’s hard, it’s borderline grimdark before there was grimdark.

This series is hugely popular with combat vets like me, probably because Cook himself is a Vietnam-era veteran who writes soldiers like how they actually are, not someone’s imagined version of a soldier.

For me, The Black Company opened a whole range of personalities that could “work” for fantasy—the grim, desperate men of the Company are not good men… but they’re heroes nonetheless. I found The Black Company’s focus on character over grandiose plot to be refreshing after many years of reading swollen tomes. Even better, The Black Company taught me a lot about focusing in on the relationship between men: the Company men talk like the men I know, gruff, to the point, competitive and combative even when they’re working together. It feels rough and real in a way that sticks… show more.

Upon discovering Cook’s worlds, the dreamer in me fell in love with the idea that the antagonists do not always need to be good people. The Black Company are a band of mercenaries working for the worst villains yet theirs is a gripping tale with surprises aplenty. Knowing where Croaker ends up makes one want to go back and start over, just because.

This novel sparked for me a way of writing villainous heroes such as those in my Ghosts series. Unique and interesting.