![]() ![]() Even seen through the primary narrator’s somewhat romantic eyes, there’s a businesslike miserableness in these books I hadn’t previously encountered in fantasy. Mercenaries pillage, rape, and slaughter, presented in some detail and matter-of-factly. There’s a rejection of the mythic, fairytale setting in the Black Company books, and a wholehearted embrace of a “realistic” world where the battlefield reeks of blood, excrement, and decay. He set aside the archaic prose flourishes of all those authors, instead drawing on hardboiled fiction to give his stories a contemporary feel. ![]() No matter how callous their heroes, they were ultimately still cut from recognizable heroic cloth.Ĭook introduced something new. Both Moorcock and Wagner were rooted in the foundations of swords & sorcery laid by Robert E. I had read some gritty fantasy previously - Michael Moorcock and Karl Edward Wagner in particular had published some pretty dark stories in the 1960s and 70s - but it was all written in the old familiar fantasy style. When my friend Carl lent me his copy of The Black Company back in 1984 I didn’t know what was about to hit me. ![]() As soon as I opened The Black Company last May, I knew I was back home among a band of brothers I’d first met and come to love over thirty years ago. ![]()
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