The Black Company is the first entry in Glen Cook's series following the eponymous mercenary company, and is usually considered one of the first "grimdark" novels - a subgenre that would explode in popularity in the mid 2000s and early 2010s with Mark Lawrence and Joe Abercrombie.

This is an excellent start to the series. We get tossed right into the action, with Cook expecting the reader to fill in bits and pieces as we get a long. Very quickly we get a feel for the world, for the kind of men these mercenaries are, and for the Black Company itself, which is really its own character altogether. There are no shining princes here, no good triumphing over evil. True to its name, the Black Company are the bad guys. They fight for the evil empire against the rebels, they kill men in their sleep, they burn villages and rape and steal.

That said, Cook shows us that just because someone is bad or evil, they aren't just evil The Company protects its own. It follows its own moral code. Our narrator, Croaker, is a physician and often heroic. The leading men of the Company aren't all bad - they are comrades and friends and respect each other. 

Croaker writes with a soldier's bluntness. Simple and direct, while never being dry. Croaker is also the Annalist for the Company, the historian, and Cook has brilliant set up a role within the company that allows for virtually endless stories to be told: as long as there's a company, there's an Annalist. This was an excellent first entry, setting up an interesting world with tons of potential for self-contained stories while also weaving some long-term plots in the background and drip-feeding them to us. There are 9 more entries in the series, so I'm excited to see where it goes from here.