I just couldn't get into the book, unfortunately. A lot of interesting things happened, but I couldn't get emotionally attached to characters, so nothing they got themselves into really touched me. I don't care about the typical nobody being singled out by a powerful entity thing and it rarely work for me. I did like the fact that Cook stayed away from archaic language and stuck to a very consistent narrative, unlike Nine Princes in Amber and On a Pale Horse that I've read earlier this year. Okay book, I just wish I cared about it more.

Gritty, military fiction that set the precedent for Malazan to come and bowl it over. Cook takes his pragmatic, down to earth portrayals of his characters and thrusts them into an avalanche of adversity. Another one just for the fantasy lovers.

I finally finished this book, two years after I started. It's a book about a mercenary company in service to what appears to be an evil power. Evil, however, seems to be a relative thing here. There are lots of battles, but they aren't described in a lot of detail. Lots of people get killed, but mostly out of the main reader view. The main members of the company are slightly more interesting than the plot. The viewpoint character is Croaker, the doctor of the company. He's also a warrior and fighter though, as well as the current Company historian ("annalist" - the Company has been in existence for a long, long time, and keeps records of its history.) There's a lot of magic and wizards of various kinds that show up. None of them are Gandalf-type (or even Saruman-type) wizards. They're battle wizards. They support the soldiers who are on the ground. They scheme against each other. They're strange and disturbing too. I'm not sure why I keep reading stories with mercenaries. I don't really enjoy reading about battles even when we don't see them that close up. Some of the weird wizards and the settings made me think of dimly-remembered Clark Ashton Smith stories, just in their levels of strangeness. I don't know if it's just this edition, but there are spelling errors that suggest that the author doesn't really know how words are spelled. It's "portcullis" not "portcullus", and "height", not "heighth."

I DNFed this book a chapter in. The characters are vague and impossible to picture since you only get vague descriptors. There's no real explanation of how their world works aside from their role in it. The story invents creatures and then doesn't explain anything about them. I just am not enjoying it. I feel like I could grow to like the main character if he didn't have convenient lapses of memory regarding his historical learning where one of his fellow mercs has to explain things to him. I'm sure this is someone else's cup of tea, but it just isn't mine.

I've heard that this book is either one that you love or hate..and well, I suppose it's quite obvious where my feelings fall. It is quite surprising that I didn't like it because I have enjoyed quite a number of books by authors who consider Glen Cook one of their major influences. I love the concept of a group of mercenaries who are able to do things that characters in other fantasy novels aren't able to do because the reader already knows they aren't heroes. They also aren't villains, so you still want to cheer for them, and possibly the most important: you are intrigued by their mystery so you want to get to know them. However, I couldn't find myself developing an interest in any of the characters apart from brief curiously in the case of Raven. Also, something I don't usually complain about: I felt there was a lack of worldbuilding. Perhaps this is because the novel is fairly short, but I just felt that there was some description missing as most of the novel was filled with dialogue (at least it seemed that way) and a lot of the writing seemed choppy.