THE BLACK COMPANY by Glen Cook - No Spoiler Review (Chronicles Of The Black Company Book 1)

I want to give a big thank you to all my patrons and I'll be doing a kingsguard roll call after today's video welcome back to the fancy Network everyone my name is of course Jimmy nuts and today we're going to be talking about the black Company by Glenn cook not the entire overarching series that has almost 10 or more books I believe but just book one in this Epic Fantasy Dark Fantasy military fantasy series this book came out in May of 1984 and has a long long history and a lot of influence in the things that we see in modern fantasy today I did mention the fact that it is dark fantasy and I have noticed that authors who have become you know spearheads for Dark Fantasy uh in the Modern Age have often times pointed back to Glenn cook as being an inspiration and doing something vastly different than what was going on in the genre in the 80s and in before uh those likes are Stephen Erickson Joe Abercrombie and many many others so I wanted to read this series mainly out of curiosity I wanted to see what it had for me and maybe take a look back into the 80s and see what was developing that has influenced what we read today in the fantasy genre also Alan from the Library of Alexandria has recommended this to me personally along with Stephen Erickson who wrote melasin and he said that this series had a lot of influence on him whenever it came to the Marines which is some of my favorite parts of the melasin series however the one weird thing that I have found with the black Company by Glenn cook is that it seems that a bunch of people who read malazin or do Abercrombie or any other Dark Fantasy they try to go down this path as well and I have seen mixed results to say the least many people consider the first book of the black company series the Black company to be the weakest at least from one I've seen here online so let's talk about what I loved about the book some of the common criticisms that I have seen online and also I guess I should probably tell you what the series slash book is about right the Dominator is an extremely powerful wizard who has the ability to turn his most bitter enemies into his loyal servants even those nearly equal in Magic the most potent of his victims are called the ten who were taken or just the taken for short with his wife the lady whose magical skill is second only to that of the Dominator he founded an empire unrivaled for evil it was overthrown by a rebellion led by the White Rose but neither She nor the rebel Wizards were strong enough to kill the Dominator the Lady or the taken the best they could do was to render them unconscious and imprison them their prison was a place called the barrel land now after about 400 years we end up having a wizard or a magician going in and talking to the lady trying to learn from the lady to harness more power he ends up being tricked taken over by the lady and then the lady Rises out of the barrel land and starts bringing back the ten who were taken however she does not bring back the one person who is more powerful than she the Dominator she has left the Dominator to rot essentially in the barrel land and that is kind of where black company starts off there are people obviously coming together in a rebellion just like they did with the white rose and we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of this conflict and of all this craziness lots of magic lots of wizards with a mercenary band of elite soldiers so this is very much High fantasy but the one thing that it does is it kind of peels back the layers of a lot of the high fantasy stuff that I'm mentioning here that is the World building that I think is quite neat and then gives you the perspective of the grunts on the ground this mercenary band is simply just trying to make their way through this conflict and get paid and they don't always find themselves on the right side of the battle and I thought that that was a really amazing thing and even though we've seen this done a lot in the modern fantasy genre back in the 80s you know maybe it wasn't happening so often or really ever this might have been the first time we ever really got to the boots on the ground level things where not every single character has an amazing trait that makes them a chosen one or anything so when you peel those layers back and you get lower to the ground you get really relatable flawed characters and that's where a lot of the Dark Fantasy stuff comes from the gray characters as Everyone likes to talk about Glenn cook does this not just in a way that's impressive for his time but for me I found these characters to be awesome this is a chronicling of the tales and throughout the books there are different chroniclers from what I've been told but this one here is actually being being told from the healer's perspective Croaker's a lot more than just a Healer I mean he's a doctor for the company he is handling some of the most grotesque injuries all the while also being the historian for the company so we get this really interesting thing that at least through this first book were with Croaker and he has a way of describing these events that are actually completely unique to his perspective and one of the things that I've been told that's a strength as this series goes on is that there are different chroniclers that are not Croaker and you'll be able to tell who's the one telling you the history without even hearing the name because of the way that it is written which shows that Glenn cook takes special care when considering the way that he's doing this like framed chronicling you know and also from what perspective it is so that's strong character writing that's a strong narrative I like that a lot in a story and where I was seeing a lot of crossover with milazzin if you happen to be an elazza fan and even if you're not is the fact that the names do remain very uh simple but can have some some different meanings right so we have Croaker we have the captain the lieutenant silent Goblin which I really really like Tom Tom brother one eye uh Elmo is also a sergeant in the company and the list goes on and on and on and the naming conventions do remind me a lot of malazin and I think that they add a little bit to the personalities of these characters in this band of you know I don't want to call Misfits because they actually work really well together but they do bicker and they have conversations about Petty things and uh they have feuds and whatnot you know and there's some people that don't fit in like we don't really trust this guy Raven what's up with Raven he's a leaner he's a little bit of an edge Lord so there's a lot of personalities here there is some bit of distance from the perspective and this is where I see a lot of people one of the big criticisms I see is that the characters they just couldn't get with the characters but I think if you're familiar with more of a distance POV from something like malazin for instance I think that that you could be comfortable here and I find it fun to fill in the blanks and also recognize that this is being told to me by somebody like someone is telling you the story so I I happen to enjoy the characters quite a bit and I think that there's a good range of characters within the black company in this first book so even though these soldiers are in this High fantasy world they're very relatable very human down to the nitty-gritty of who these people are and what's happening in a much more intimate personal level than many of the other fantasy of its time and you know still today I I see a lot of that and I think that Glenn cook has a place and no matter what era that he can write strong characters and one of the things that cook does really really well calling him cook sounds weird it sounds like a black company name Glenn cook does really well is that he shows more than he tells he is definitely a shower not a teller and I think that that is a good way of describing black company in general because sometimes it can feel a little sporadic but whenever a character is supposed to be Sly or cunning or a badass or whatever it might be you don't have to just take his word for it he's actually going to show you those examples within the story uh and there is a scene with Raven and this really isn't a spoiler but essentially they end up killing uh what is kind of like an Outlook or a spy and before they go they say hey Raven says hey we must burn his feet he tells the captain burn this dead body's feet and around like what why and he's like that way it looks like we interrogated them because they're kind of doing you know they're they're uh moving with with knowledge that the enemy doesn't know that they have right so they actually have a lot more Intel than the enemy would ever know so if they were just to leave the dead body there it'd be like whoa how did they know this Lookout was here they must know something but instead Raven burns the bottom of this dead body's feet to say oh that's how they got the Intel that's how they knew all this extra information is that they tortured him and that is a really amazing way of showing me that Raven is cunning and highly intelligent and dangerous uh in all accounts rather than just saying Raven was super cunning and and you know so Sly and blah blah blah blah like I see in a lot of fantasy novels so I like that fact and it's a very effective way of also moving the plot along without taking a break to do some Exposition or have someone you know belch out some ugly dialogue about well you know Raven is so Sly and cunning you know Jay he showed me and it Advanced the plot and it took two sentences and for me that is way more efficient than just like an exposition info dump so as far as the criticism the characters goes I find myself on the opposite end of some of the common criticisms that I see for black company with the characters I I think I've laid out what I like about them and some good examples but another thing that you will hear is that the writing is very like tense and terse and short and brief and that is true they are short choppy sentences and I there's certainly nowhere as abrupt as I was expecting whenever you read online you know people bouncing off of this series and I can understand why some people would not like the short choppy sentences uh I've heard people say that Glenn cook hates commas if it should have been a comma he just puts a period and starts a new sentence like he loves sentences and I understand that but the way that it flows it kind of you know it actually is realistic to what it would be like if I was a historian in a military mercenary band and I'm sitting there and I'm journaling that's kind of the feel I get so for me it actually didn't disrupt me it made me more immersed and this is an example where you don't have to go overly flowery with Pros to have a really distinct style and it's so important to match Style with the world and this world is very matter-of-fact this world is very dark and the writing actually gets that across in a way for being so short now what I will say is paragraphs are almost like individual vignettes or scenes so you will jump time without ever really acknowledging the fact that there was a time Jump you just kind of have to figure it out so it's you're kind of being thrown in the deep end paragraph to paragraph which some people feel is a bit jarring ah so it's like Jack France's dying Earth well yeah I would I understand why people would relate it to something like dying Earth by Jack Vance at least that first book but it's not as pulpey as that and I don't say it in a bad thing because I think that pulp you know pulpey fantasy is awesome and what Jack vanson dying Earth was really really awesome um but it's not quite to that level I think it's a lot more congruent throughout the story it's not like you're just being thrown in with random people and random scenes constantly and you have no footing it still is you know there's a sequence of events that are happening and you just happen to be jumping into the sequences that's a chronicler you know felt like he should be recording or had time to so you kind of get you got to be on you got to be on the balls of your feet you gotta be on your tiptoes here you know you got to be able to dive in and understand what's going on but I didn't really have a problem with this and even though I do see shades of you know even like the northmen uh from jabbercrombie's first law series and obviously the melasm uh Marines and all that stuff I still feel like there's something unique to the black Company by Glenn cook that has drawn me in and that is some of the overtly wacky uh World building there are flying carpets there's massive of leopards and as I told you with the premise in the plot introduction there's a lot of magic as well and when you start seeing the lady and in the limper and these these ten right that have been taken you start seeing them interact with these lowly soldiers it makes for a really interesting dynamic because we're following the everyday Marine the grunt and then they're talking these people who have been alive for you know centuries and been in the barrel land and they are super powerful but there's an interest on both sides Croaker is fascinated with the lady but it also feels feels like the taken are also kind of fascinated with them so those scenes where those people are interjected and uh you know I found them to be I could not take my eyes away from the page I was kind of glued to it in fact and the thing about the taken that I I love is that yeah this resistance that's trying to go against the lady and the taken they're very United I think it's they're called the 18. I might be wrong about that but they're banding together and it's very obvious what their goal is but the taken are fighting against the Rebellion but they're fighting against each other just as much so the bad guys here there's a lot of you know you call them the bad guys but there are times where you might root for one of them because they're going against one of the other take and that you hate a little bit more and the ladies motivations and not bringing back the dominators so a lot of the more morally complex stuff actually comes from the side of the bad guys at least in my opinion and then you have this mercenary you have the black company that's just in the middle of it all so it makes for a lot of dynamics that you would not normally get in an epic Dark Fantasy of this you know this threat of this you know pretty much overpowered force uh the thing that they don't have is unity and without Unity it's up in the air it makes it a more competitive thing in battle and people are wondering where the white rose might come from so you have that question kind of lingering over these books and I'll be honest this is one of my top priorities to get through I'm going to read every black company book from this point on because if this is the worst that Glenn cook has to offer me in the black company we're good to go I'm gonna eat this up uh I don't have a problem with the writing I don't have a problem with the characterization I like military fantasy quite a bit especially when it's down to this low of a level and it's this intimate I think that he takes extreme care in the povs and I love a good chronicling tale so I hope that kind of gives my perspective on the black company and what it does that not even just for the 80s but for now uh makes it special and I know that there are going to be people that drop down in the comments and I encourage you to you know saying hey this did not work for me I didn't love it so maybe uh this would give you an opportunity to revisit it at a time or maybe if you have been a little bit hesitant to jump into this older series because you have seen people bounce off of it maybe this would change your mind because I really really like this book and I think in 2023 the black company is up there with one of my top priorities to finish and I've read a lot of fantasy series I'm getting I've gotten through most of the big named ones right this feels so exciting to find something that's a little bit older that is very unique and still dark fantasy which I tend to be drawn towards and I have 10 books of it like there's still things out there to discover and to enjoy and it's interesting the fact that it's written a bit differently it's interesting in the fact that it's not like other typical epic fantasies but still feels really high fantasy and really epic so that's awesome if you found this review helpful it'd be awesome if you could hit the like button if you loved it think about subscribing I do kind all kinds of book content here on the channel and if you really want to help out the channel there is a patreon in the description it's optional but always appreciated until I see you next time be good be safe and remember to always keep turning the page and a big thank you to all my patrons especially my kingsgar which include Lauren Henrik Kai Simon Oscar Stewart Stephen R akaika Amanda RJ Shaw Nicoletta Tanner Jennifer Garrick Frank C Evie Fever J Sarah Pat Kevin Ryan Michael Terence Wade Darren Taylor Dairy John C boss match and Sebastian Benjamin jobot Noel Amanda L Kyle C dot Scott Steve talks books and Caitlyn and Dylan M thank you all so much you're the best [Music]

Channel: The Fantasy Nuttwork

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Keywords: THE BLACK COMPANY by Glen Cook - No Spoiler Review (The Black Company Book 1), glen cook, the black company, book review, chronicles of the black company, dark fantasy, the black company glen cook, the black company review, the black company book review, the black company lore, the black company no spoiler review, should i read black company, black company no spoiler review, no spoiler review the black company, no spoiler review black company, the fantasy nuttwork

Id: nm90grI24-M

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022