Cook - She Is the Darkness review

In this volume of Glen Cook's Black Company series, the company has pressed it's war against the last remaining Shadowmaster. Croaker, Captain of the Company, seems to built some sort of an alliance with Soulcatcher but is keeping plans secret. Murgen, the Standardbearer, remains the Annalist and the narration is from his point of view.

This book was about twice the length of any of the previous Black Company novels, but has less real action. It's good in the beginning for about 100 pages. But then the next 300 are pretty slow. It finally picks up again in the last 50-60 pages.

Most of the book is taken up by Murgen's accounts of his Ghostwalking. In the previous book, the company learned how to use the unconscious sorcerer Smoke to allow them to spirit-travel throughout the world and even back in time to observe what is, and has been, going on. Through much of this book Murgen continues to use Smoke. Later on, he's able to Ghostwalk in his dreams, though he has less control and cannot go back in time.

So, far too much of this book is made up of Murgen observing things and not nearly enough of the sometimes frenetic action from the earlier books. One think I though was interesting is that there is a passage in which Croaker, the former Annalist, criticized Murgen's work. It seemed much like an editor criticizing this particular novel by Glen Cook, because I had similar thoughts.

Still, it is a Black Company book and the writing is good, the characters are interesting, and the plot is engaging (though rather slow this time around).



/ [Viking]

   More book reviews