A long time ago, when Grimdark was not Grimdark, I came across the “Black Company” books and read the first three. After so many eons, I decided to have another go to see how they’d withstand the test of time. This time round, maybe because I read the the first trilogy in one go, I found the change over the three books awkward. The first book is exactly what it is marketed as even back then: the lives of a group of hardened soldiers in a very dark, war-ravaged world. The characters aren't necessarily good, and they aren't heroes in the traditional fantasy sense. Of course we have a big war going on and it’s widespread all over the continent and our characters are the usual mere cogs in the narrative. The highlight of the first book is the comradeship of the soldiers. The next two novels definitely get weirder as we get into the bigger issues. Our characters actually start to become The Heroes a la Abercrombie, which is a little uncomfortable. Suddenly, our crew of nobody squaddies are the ones who are finding the super-secret talismans, and our company becomes the center of a prophecy that could disjoint the world's incredibly overpowered overlords. We stumble on to the secret history of the dark powers in the world, that only our single team of wonderful and all-knowing soldiers now knows (and are the only survivors of - the usual fantasy fodder basically). Little of it is well-explained; you just have to agree to "go with it" and hope that eventually we will find out what is going on as our characters find out. There are numerous unexplained jumps in the narrative and you just have to follow along hoping an explanation will be provided. There are some interesting characters, and conflicts abound. The writing is not very descriptive but still shows a somewhat minimalist use of language. I personally can't stand awkward exposition or info dumps that we see in a lot of fantasy, so It was a breath of fresh air fantasy-wise. My favourite point of the series was that I liked that the novels were only around 300ish pages long and weren’t padded out to a 1,000 page door-stoppers because every rock has to be described (*argh*) as we see in a lot of contemporary Fantasy. Still a meh read after all these years.

Book Review SF = Speculative Fiction ( )