Chronicles of the Black Company

Chronicles of the Black Company is the first omnibus collection in the Black Company Series by Glen Cook, comprising the books The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose.

The cover art is by Raymond Swanland, who is perhaps my favorite fantasy-themed artist working these days. It's kinda hard for me to attach an adjective for his work... except for ferocious. He does all of the cover art for these Black Company omnibus collections, and all of them make you feel like there is going to be some badass things going on in the book. And there are.

The Black Company is the first book in the series, and in this collection, and makes a pretty good impression for the series as a whole. The story follows the first-person point-of-view of one Croaker, the annalist of the eponymous Black Company, as they are working in a coastal city called Beryl, and are then hired into service to an empire across the sea to the north, ruled by the dreaded "Lady". The empire has been fighting rebel forces (creatively named "The Rebel"), and it becomes the Black Company's job to assist in defeating these forces. 

This first installment is definitely my favorite in the omnibus. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is snappy, realistic, and often funny, and the prose is not burdened with overlong, flowery descriptions. The tale is written like a journal of a man in the military, and is thus very straightforward. Fighting and battles are not drawn-out, instead being realistically portrayed as short engagements spread out over time with periods of lull in between. Despite the long chapter lengths, the book is fast-paced, and there are plenty of breaks that allow you to take a break from reading for the moment without being caught in the middle of a scene.

Second is Shadows Linger, which is just as good as the first installment. It takes place a few years after the events in The Black Company, the events mostly taking place in the city of Juniper, based around the mysterious growth of an ominous black castle located there.

All of the details behind the writing as were in The Black Company are true here as well, except for a couple of differences. Firstly, the chapters are much shorter, and secondly, while most is still told in Croaker's first-person point-of-view, a good deal of it is in third-person as well. It might seem strange at first, but it will make a lot of sense once you get to a certain point in the book.

Last in the omnibus is The White Rose, which takes place almost a decade after Shadows Linger, and whose story I can reveal nothing of due to extremely spoileriffic reasons. I will tell you that The White Rose falls a little flat compared to the first two books, not really coming into its own as a page turner until the last 120 pages or so. It continues the shorter-chapter pattern of the second book as well as the alternating first- and third-person points-of-view, and just like Shadows Linger makes sense even if even stranger than it was before.

Chronicles of the Black Company is a great buy, even if The White Rose doesn't live up to the first two books. It's hard to beat three books for fifteen dollars or less, in a trade paperback format, so that for me ends up pushing this up into "Books That Are Awesome" territory. I highly recommend this gritty, dark, humorous series with its realistic portrayal of military lifestyle. In the end, you will not be disappointed.

Rating: Awesome