The worldbuilding and exposition are scant and entire battles skipped, helping keep down the page count. In a world of doorstoppers, it is a relatively slender volume, with my trade paperback clocking in at 274 pages and my mass-market paperback at 319. It is the latter because it flouts many of the conventions of the sub-genre. The Black Company is both an epic fantasy and an anti-epic fantasy. (There are substantial parallels with the Forsaken from The Wheel of Time, but that is a discussion for another day.) Her primary lieutenants are the Taken, ten immortal sorcerers of slightly less immense power, one of whom, Soulcatcher, hires the Company and is there primary point of contact. The Lady herself is an immortal sorcerer who is effectively a demigod. The Black Company keeps multiple sorcerers on staff. A map was issued with an RPG adaptation, though.Īfter an early encounter with a were-leopard/vampire, The Black Company doesn’t have monsters, just monstrous men. Unfortunately, neither the new trade paperback nor the old mass-market paperback include maps. The Black Company is the sort of book where it is handy to have a map ready at hand. They start out fighting rebel forces in the north but find themselves fighting backwards, mostly, across a good chunk of the continent. The Company starts the book in the southern continent on Beryl under an existing contract, but they quickly find themselves headed to the northern continent in the service of the Lady.

And POV character Croaker should know when he isn’t serving as the Company medic, he serves as its annalist, both maintaining records of that long history and writing new history as it happens (the book is ostensibly excerpted from those annals, although Cook doesn’t lean into that conceit). The Company is a free mercenary company with a history dating back hundreds of years. The Black Company follows the titular Black Company, more commonly referred to and otherwise referred to here as the Company. Also I was lazy and didn’t post a review on Tuesday when the book was released like I should have. But it isn’t like I was reading much adult fantasy at my tender age in 1984, so it and its peers are as new to me as a book from 1964 or 1944. I had long since owned The Black Company in mass-market paperback, but I finally cracked it open after Tor sent me a review copy of their new edition, complete with new introduction by Malazan author Steven Erikson.įirst published in 1984, The Black Company technically falls after my arbitrary cutoff for Vintage SF. Which is probably why Tor decided to reissue it (as a handsome trade paperback with a bland cover) for their “Tor Essentials” line this past Tuesday. Glen Cook’s The Black Company was a milestone work that had an outsized influence on the fantasy genre.

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