Monster Mike's Geek Reads: A Hat-Trick of Random!

I've got a hat-trick this time:  three short reviews of books I've read recently that I think are worthy of discussion - one recent release and two that have been around for a while.

Forever Red by Margaret Stohl

My daughter and I were both pretty excited to see this in print.  We're both big fans of Black Widow, and we both reel with indignation that Marvel Studios won't agree to give Black Widow her own movie despite an outpouring of fan support.  Just check the twitter hashtag #BlackWidowMovie if you don't believe me.

So when this book hit the stands, we figured that this would be the story that Marvel could base their Black Widow movie on.  Although the action takes place in the present (i.e. with Natasha Romanova working with SHIELD), a lot of the story has its roots in her Red Room origins and her original mentor, Ivan Somodorov.

 The action in the novel follows Ana Orlova, a Brooklyn teenager who is just trying to fit in.  However, Ana's past is anything but typical.  The daughter of a brilliant Russian quantum physicist, she was subjected to brutal experiments as a young child by Ivan Somodorov before being rescued by Natasha Romanov and placed under SHIELD protection.  In the present day, she has escaped SHIELD custody and is living out on the streets, perpetually haunted by persistent dreams of a young man with an hourglass tattoo.

Natasha learns through SHIELD that children are now going missing all over Eastern Europe, and discovers that her (believed dead) former mentor and torturer is actually alive and up to his old tricks again.  And Ana is the key to stopping him.  Natasha finally catches up to Ana at a fencing tournament where Ana has just bumped into the boy of her dreams - Alex Cross, the kid with that hourglass tattoo I mentioned in the previous paragraph and you already forgot about.  Somewhat predictably, both of them turn out to be harboring latent super-powers similar to the Black Widow's, because super-hero reasons (does it really matter?  Really?).  There is an awkward teen romance between Ana and Alex, of course.  After a short cameo with Tony Stark, the final half of the novel can be summed up as follows: They hunt down Somodorov and confront him in classic Black Widow fashion.

The book is well written and enjoyable to read.  However, it's a little too focused on Ana and Alex to serve as the screenplay for the Black Widow movie.  Still, if you dig Black Widow, you won't be disappointed in this book.  Fair warning - you are likely to find this book shelved under YA Fiction or Teen Fiction, as that was clearly the intended audience for the novel.  Though it's a perfectly enjoyable read for grown-ups, the romantic teen storyline may feel a little cringe-worthy to an adult reader.

««««/5

The Stand by Stephen King

I have some pretty huge gaps in my reading history, and Stephen King is one of them.  Sure, I've read The Shining and Christine and Misery and half a dozen other horror titles of his that became movies.  But I've only read the first book of The Dark Tower series, and I have never read The Stand (until now).  These, according to Stephen King buffs, are his truly great works.

The Stand takes place in America, in the immediate aftermath of an apocalyptic super-virus.  The virus is highly contagious and quickly fatal to everyone except a tiny fraction of the population who are mysteriously immune.  The first half of the book chronicles the lives of some of these isolated survivors as they watch everyone around them die, and slowly draws them together through mysterious dreams that lead them toward the messiah-like figure of Mother Abigail; an ancient black woman living out in the prairies of Kansas.  We also get to know other characters.  People with darker natures.  Their dreams lead them toward Las Vegas where Randall Flagg aka The Walkin' Dude is busy working to establish his own new world order.

Eventually, you end up with two very clear camps.  It would be too simplistic to refer to them as good and evil, because there are a lot of subtleties involved, but it makes for a convenient shorthand.  The group of civic minded do-gooders winds up in Boulder  trying to create a livable community and a fresh start on the world guided by the gentle wisdom of Mother Abigail.  The group of win-at-all-costs survivalists ends up in Las Vegas under the dictatorial rule of Randall Flagg.  Once both groups start to get their act together, Las Vegas declares war on Boulder.  However, the war is metaphysical as much as real.

 I don't want to spoil some of the key events that happen later in the story, so we'll leave it at that.  Let's just say that the ending is jaw-droppingly awesome.  I think King hits on some really deep themes in this book - the nature of good and evil, the paradoxes of humanity itself, and at the core, why Utopian societies always fail.  The book is quite long, weighing in at around 1300 pages.  But King is a master of his craft and at no point is the reader left feeling bored or irritated by the length of the book or its languorous pacing.  Not only is it a great story, but it will give you a lot to think about when you are done reading it.

«««««/5

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

If you're getting tired of the same old recycled tropes and storylines in your reading, you might want to try American Gods.  I guarantee that it's not like anything you've read before.  Although the greater plot is loosely structured around the classic Hero's Journey, it has more in common with a magic mushroom trip at Burning Man than The Lord of The Rings.

Our reluctant hero is Shadow Moon, recently released from prison and alone in the world due to the recent death of his wife, Laura.  He quickly finds employment serving as the bodyguard of a con-man called Mr. Wednesday and soon realizes that his employer is an incarnation of Odin, the all-father.  Their travels around the country introduce Shadow to a host of other old gods and magical creatures - Mr. Nancy (Anansi), Czernobog, and Mad Sweeney - a leprechaun who gives Shadow a magic coin which ends up playing a key role in turning Shadow's dead wife into an intelligent zombie.  In this mythology, the old gods are only as powerful as the belief that people have in them, and in this new-fangled modern age the old gods feel their power waning as the new gods of technology and media take over our thoughts.

But Mr. Wednesday has a plan!  He is trying to rally the old gods to fight a war against the new.  Shadow is abducted by the new gods, but is rescued by zombie-Laura, and Wednesday places him in hiding.  First with a trio of Egyptian gods (Anubis, Thoth, and Bast) in the guise of two small-town undertakers and their housecat.  And later in the strange town of Lakeside, Minnesota where a resident Kobold (Hinzelmann) has blessed the town but sometimes abducts and kills children from the community.

Again, I don't want to spoil the ending.  Let's just say that certain sacrifices have to be made.  One of the satisfying things about this story is that after the climax of the main action, there is a nice epilogue where all of the open plot threads get tied up and laid to rest.  Overall, I'd say this is a masterful work of storytelling.  However, it is not an easy read.  Gaiman's prose is thick and chewy, his pacing can be uneven, and there are some rather psychedelic sequences that will challenge many readers raised on the bland oatmeal of conventional popular writing.

«««««/5

Monster Mike's Geek Reads: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Okay, picture this.  

It's 2044 and the world is a post-apocalyptic dystopia.  Yes, yes, you think.  I've seen this one before.  There was a nuclear war or a killer virus or an alien invasion or global warming or some shit and now everyone is running around in souped-up killer cars fighting over the last few drops of gasoline or clean water or Mountain Dew Code Red, right?

No.  The dystopian future is actually one based on increasing economic inequality.  The masters of capital have won completely and the 1% have everything.  Everyone else is left with scraps.  Many people live in "the stacks" - shantytown high-rise structures of aging mobile homes - and daily life is a struggle for survival in a barely-functioning economy where all public goods and resources have been privatized and precisely calibrated to wring every last drop of life out of the huddled masses.

On the bright side, there is OASIS.  Part MMORPG and part virtual life, people escape their reality in this simulated world.  OASIS brings education to the youth, and OASIS virtual currency is the most stable medium of exchange on the planet.  Invented by the brilliant but eccentric James Donovan Halliday, OASIS is where our hero, young Wade Watts finds meaning and purpose in an otherwise hopeless existence.  You see, when James Halliday died years before, he created an Easter egg hunt within OASIS.  The first to find all the clues and pass all the tests would inherit Halliday's multi-billion dollar fortune and become the wealthiest person on the planet.  Millions of egg hunters, or "gunters" as they would later be called tried for years to even find the first clue, but no one could.  After some time, most of the world gave up on the hunt as being either impossible or a hoax, but not Wade Watts and a few of his virtual friends.  Halliday was known for being a huge fan of 1980's pop culture, and these die-hard gunters obsessively study every clue, every nuance of this era and the relationship to Halliday's life in order to understand the keys to the great uncracked puzzle.

However, when Wade finally thinks laterally enough to discover the first clue, the race is on.  Teams of mercenary gunters with powerful corporate sponsorship will stop at nothing, including assassination attempts in the real world, to beat the independent gunters to the prize.  Wade and his friends and fellow gunters Aech, Art3mis, Daito and Shoto have to make careful decisions about whether to compete or cooperate with one another against the powerful and ruthless Innovative Online Industries over the next several months as the search heats up and more clues are unraveled.  Wade and his cohorts have to resort to truly desperate measures in both the virtual and meat-space worlds to survive.

This book has a lot going for it.  Though the premise is kind of silly, it pulls you in and keeps you there.  The writing is absolutely gripping, the characters are compelling, and the book is very hard to set aside for little annoyances like sleep, eating, your weekly RPG session, or the house being on fire.  The action and the stakes keep rising throughout the story and the ending pays off well.  However, you might find the persistent love of all things 1980s a little grating if you are too young to remember Zork and don't geek out on old Commodore 64 games.  Even so, it's a fun book and a super-solid read.  If you really like it, check out Armada by the same author.

«««««/5

Monster Mike's Geek Reads: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Time is an illusion.  
Lunchtime doubly so.

--

Once in a while, this Geek Who Reads feels the need to wander again the Elysian fields of the misty past and re-read a much-loved work to see if it still holds all the wonder and beauty that it did for me in childhood.  Back in high school, I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, the Universe and Everything.  This was, of course, back in the halcyon days of about 1983 when men were men, women were women, and trilogies had three books.  Then 1984 came and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish came out, heralded breathlessly as "The astonishing fourth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy!!"  Well, pedantic me had had enough.  Every right-thinking person knows that trilogies can't have four books, so I abandoned my pursuit of the series and never even noticed when Mostly Harmless was published in 1992.

Now, if you grew up on a steady diet of Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, Gordon R. Dickson, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, and Roger Zelazny, then you have a pretty good idea of what science fiction is all about.  Mostly, it's about putting people in novel futuristic hypothetical situations that couldn't possibly happen today and watching how they respond.  Science fiction is truly a laboratory for exploring human values, where you alter the social construct by making a few key technological changes, and protagonists with fantastic skills and amazing knowledge navigate the perils put before them.  Then Douglas Adams came along and said, "F**k that!  You chumps have the imaginative breadth of a sack of stale peanuts," and proceeded to gleefully thumb his nose at everything that classic sci-fi has held to be holy.  In this far flung sci-fi world, no one understands how their technology works and the characters are just as cluelessly incompetent as average mouth-breathing citizen of today is.  Mostly, they seem to muddle through on dumb luck alone.

Arthur Dent is the primary un-hero of this extended story.  Just a normal British bloke, trying to stop his house from being demolished by uncaring government officials to make way for a traffic bypass at the opening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  But along comes Ford Prefect, Arthur's unusual friend who warns him that the Earth is about to be destroyed by uncaring Vogons to make way for an intergalactic bypass.  The duo manages to get aboard the Vogon vessel just before the Earth is destroyed, but are soon captured and thrown out the airlock for failing to appreciate Vogon poetry.  Moments before death, they are picked up by The Heart of Gold, a ship powered by the infinite improbability drive and commanded by Zaphod Beeblebrox who is Ford's cousin and also the President of the Galaxy.  Accompanied by Trillian, a former earthwoman, and Marvin the Paranoid Android, they journey to the world of Magrathea where they learn the story about the supercomputer Deep Thought and the Ultimate Answer - 42.  They also learn that Earth was built as an even more super super-computer to come up with the Ultimate Question.

That's Hitchhiker's Guide.  The following four books make even less sense, and defy summarization.  In fact, the whole extended story is just flaming nonsense that gets weirder and jumpier as it bounces across the span of time and throughout the infinity of space.  But, and it's a big but, along the way Adams drops all these brilliant little bits that have become iconic.

Let's just list a few:

42 - Every geek knows this one, even if you've never read the books or seen a movie.  42 is THE ANSWER TO LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING.

A whale and a bowl of petunias falling through the atmosphere and having a few fleeting thoughts before splattering across the landscape below.  If you see someone wearing a variant of this on a t-shirt, they are signaling to you that they are on the inside of geek culture.

Marvin the Paranoid Android.

DON'T PANIC.  The reassuring words emblazoned across The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by which I mean the book that Ford Prefect lends to Arthur Dent which is a sort of encyclopedia of everything.

Towels.  This is another leitmotif of the series.  Always carry a towel.  Useful for so many things.

You get the idea.  It just goes on and on.  Like a mushroom hallucination, it makes no sense at all but it has left these images burned into our collective subconscious.

One of the other repeating themes of the book is probability as a fifth dimension.  The characters' travels take them through the depth and breadth of space-time, from the very beginning of time to the very end and all throughout the unimaginable vastness of space.  And a point that is often demonstrated is that through all that time and all that space, which is so unimaginably vast, everything you can conceive of is likely to have happened somewhere, somewhen, no matter how improbable.  The Infinite Improbability drive actually works on this principle, powered by a cup of tea, and is what allows the characters to bounce around the universe so.

Adam's writing is clever and witty, filled with twisted logic and turns of phrase that simply sparkle.  He is a master of great sentences.  But even though his short game is fantastic, his long game leaves something to be desired.  The overall plot of the series is wandering and ultimately rather unsatisfying, in spite of the fact that every page is a pleasure to read.  However, no one can deny what an impact these books have had.  Reading this series will forever change your outlook, even if it leaves you unsure as to why.  And that is the ultimate hallmark of a great work of literature.

Overall, I rate it at 42.

Monster Mike's Geek Reads: Monster Mike Pulls a Hat Trick

Well, this geek-who-reads has been reading up a storm in the past year, and I've got a truckload of recommendations for you in Monsters and Modern Fantasy.  Not one, not two, but three books.  And each book is really just a placeholder for a whole series of books that are some of the best current geek-lit out there.  Go read all the books in these three series now.

Now.  Yes, right now.  Shoo.

Have you finished yet?  It's okay.  I'll wait.

(Twiddles thumbs.  Makes a play on Words With Friends - SCROTUM for 77 points and another bingo against Brian.  There were higher scoring options, of course.  But when you get a chance to play a funny body part, you play it, no questions asked amiright?)

Good job, reader!  Skin Game is book number 15 in The Dresden Files series by LARPer and author Jim Butcher.  And of course, you also read the short story collection Side Jobs for extra credit because it kills you to not have every last scrap of canon.  It can be difficult to discuss a single book from this series because context matters, and things that happened in earlier books have echoes that keep ringing in the later ones.  Harry Dresden is a private investigator and wizard living in Chicago.  Somewhere deep in the back of my brain, I hear Robbie Coltrane's voice whispering "Yer a wizard, Harry," whenever I dive into one of these books, but this series should not be confused with Hogwarts.  Dresden's world is simply our everyday world, with massive power struggles between the Summer and Winter courts of Faerie, werewolves of multiple origins, a white council of wizards, and three different courts of vampires lurking in the shadows of our existence.  The principal characters, both friends and foes of Dresden, are rich and interesting and each have their own arcs of personal development and tragedy.

Skin Game is essentially a heist story.  Dresden has been piled with different obligations and complications throughout the series, and these converge to force him to work with some old enemies to steal the Holy Grail out of the personal vault of Hades, Lord of the Underworld.  Cross-purposes, competing agendas, and inevitable betrayals compete with some really thrilling action in this story, and Dresden manages to survive if not come out completely on top in the end.  The private conversation between Dresden and Hades himself is definitely the OMG moment in the book.  As a rule, the books in the Dresden Files series get better and better as you go along.  However, they are not strictly episodic.  This series reads best in published order, and watching the short-lived TV show won't be any sort of useful preparation to reading Skin Game.  Start with Storm Front and enjoy about 100 hours of great reading to prepare yourself for this book.

 out of 5

The Rhesus Chart is the fifth book in the outstanding Laundry Files series by Charles Stross.  The Laundry, in case you didn't know, is the super-secret part of British intelligence that deals with supernatural threats from beyond space and time.  We're talking principally Lovecraft mythos here, rather than the more World of Darkness vibe of Dresden.  Along with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, you can mix in a little bit of James Bond for secret agent spy action and The Office for humor and you've got the feel of The Laundry about right.  In The Atrocity Archives, you learn how Bob Howard  came to join The Laundry and why he can never leave.  Bob, you see, has made the transition from IT professional to  computational demonologist.  Magic is mostly about complex computer algorithms solving multi-dimensional differential equations, and Bob is one of the professionals at The Laundry who has mastered this craft.

In The Rhesus Chart, it seems that a group of quantitative traders working for a major London investment bank have stumbled across a formula of their own while designing a complex trading algorithm.  They all develop a keen awareness of their surroundings, highly enhanced strength and reflexes, an aversion to sunlight, and a thirst for human blood.  Even though everyone in The Laundry knows that vampires don't exist, Bob ends up inevitably on their trail and uncovers an ages-old conspiracy between man and monsters.  Charles Stross has come up with a fresh modern take on the Mythos that avoids becoming another Delta Green.

 out of 5

The Monster Hunter International series is so damn good that I recommend people don't start reading them until early on a Saturday morning during a weekend with nothing else to do.  Get comfortable, turn off the phone, have some food nearby, and wear a catheter because you will not be able to stop reading these once you start.  Larry Correia has a real gift for pulling you into the story and keeping you pinned in the literary version of a bridging double chickenwing hold until you finish the book.  You can get the first three books in the series under a collected volume called The Monster Hunters, and the author gains bonus cool points for insisting that the digital versions of his books are published without DRM.

Monster Hunter International is a private organization that collects US government bounties on supernatural creatures.  The first two books in the series, Monster Hunter International and Monster Hunter Vendetta, describe how Owen Zastava Pitt came to join MHI and face down threats of truly cosmic proportion.  Monster Hunter Alpha follows the story of Earl Harbinger, the leader of MHI and an incredibly bad-ass werewolf.  And Nemesis shifts the focus to another character in the Correia universe - Agent Franks.  Franks works for the government Monster Control Bureau and is a monster himself - Frankenstein's monster, specifically.  Long ago, he swore an oath to our founding fathers to defend America from monsters of all sorts under one condition - that the US never tries to create another one of him.  Well, Special Task Force Unicorn (aka STFU) has gone and done exactly that and Agent Franks has gone rogue.  Often at odds with MHI, Franks has to team up with them to defeat thirteen demon-infested replicas of himself in order to stop all of hell from being turned loose upon the world again.

 out of 5

It's worth noting that all three of these fictional modern fantasy worlds have a lot in common.  First of all, they all share the basic Harry Potter premise: Monsters and magic are real, and the vast bulk of humanity lives in willful ignorance of their existence because things simply work better that way.  Second, they are all highly game-able settings.  So much so, that each of these worlds already has its own role-playing game.  You can play The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, which is based on FATE mechanics.  The Laundry is a stand alone game modeled on the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and Monster Hunter International is a setting for Hero System 6 for those of you that like a lot of tactical crunch.  Finally, they are all really well crafted stories with a rich cast of interesting characters and lots of action.  They are all easy to pick up, and impossible to put down.  To me, these three series represent the vanguard of the new modern fantasy movement.  Start reading. 

Check out The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game,  The Laundry and Monster Hunter International  on DriveThruRPG!

Monster Mike's Geek Reads: Chronicles of the Black Company

"Darkness wars with darkness as the hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must. They bury their doubts with their dead.

 

Then comes the prophecy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more…"

----

I once boasted to Brian that "I've read pretty much everything."  And he asked me what I thought of The Black Company.

"The what?" I asked. 

"Just read it," he replied.  The word "moron" at the end of this directive was unspoken, but strongly implied.

So, I fired up my Kindle and plunged into The Chronicles of The Black Company, which is really the first three books (The Black Company, Shadows Linger, and The White Rose) of a nine novel series by Glen Cook.

(Ed. note: 10 if you count The Silver Spike.)

Let's start with some basics.  The Black Company is a mercenary force of fighters and wizards for hire in a grimdark fantasy world that has, well, issues.  Centuries before the action starts in these novels, this unnamed world was in the clutches of an extremely powerful wizard known as The Dominator.  The Dominator, his wife - The Lady, and a group of enslaved wizards known as The Ten Who Were Taken ruled the world in a way that many found unseemly.  Naturally, there was a rebellion led by a mythic figure known as The White Rose.  Ultimately, the rebels were victorious and The Dominator, The Lady, and The Taken were all laid to rest in the Barrowlands, not dead but eternally sleeping, their tombs protected by a network of monstrous guardians and powerful spells.  However, our story starts long after something happened.  The Lady and The Taken have reappeared, and have been re-establishing their empire from a stronghold in the North.  Once again, there is a rebellion.  Only this time, there is no White Rose to aid the rebel cause.

The events in all three books are narrated by Croaker, the Black Company's physician and annalist.  In The Black Company, the Company is hired by Soulcatcher, one of The Taken, to fight for The Lady against the rebellion.  But The Taken spend as much time working against one another as they do fighting the rebels on behalf of The Lady, and the Company find themselves used as a cat's paw in these conflicts.  The first book ends with a massive defensive battle around The Lady's stronghold at Charm, wiping out the majority of the forces on both sides of the conflict.

In Shadows Linger, much of the rising action focuses on a Company deserter called Raven and Darling, the deaf-mute child he adopted in the first book.  Raven and a cowardly innkeeper end up in a conspiracy to sell the town of Juniper's dead to the alien residents of a growing black castle.  A company detachment arrives in Juniper and we discover the castle is actually a sorcerous gateway to allow the Dominator to escape from the Barrowlands and rise again.  The Company and The Taken are ultimately able to destroy the black castle and its inhabitants, while Raven learns that Darling is the reincarnation of The White Rose, and flees with her again.  The remnants of the Company ambush the remaining Taken, and leave the service of The Lady to side with the rebels.

The events of The White Rose occur many years afterwards.  Raven is apparently dead, and Darling is the leader of the rebel fragments.  Through a series of historical documents sent to Croaker, we learn how The Lady came to be freed from the Barrowlands, and discover an impending doom:  flooding of a great river threatens to open the barrows, finally releasing The Dominator upon the world again.  The Lady and the rebels are forced into a truce to join forces in order to defeat The Dominator once and for all.

All put together, this trilogy creates an epic tale in a dark setting where there are few good guys, and fewer good choices.  The principal characters are distinct and memorable, and the antics of Goblin and One-Eye, two of the Company's wizards, provide some light relief to the grim atmosphere.   Through the story, Croaker's personal relationship with The Lady, a terrifying sorceress of nearly godlike power, deepens and becomes more complex.  Cook does a fantastic job of pulling the reader into the personal stories of each character.

There was a lot to like and a lot to dislike about The Chronicles of The Black Company.  Let's start with the bad and then see if we can redeem the book with the good.

My main gripe with the book was the author's use of Croaker as the sole narrator.  The reader only sees what Croaker sees, hears what Croaker hears, and knows only a little bit of what Croaker knows.  Throughout the books, Glen Cook steadfastly refuses to give the reader any kind of Gods-eye-view of the world at large.  The reader only knows that the sky is blue or the mountains lie to the east of the plains if Croaker chooses to mention it.  And for the most part, Croaker is not big on explaining any of the world's context to the reader.  This left me feeling very disoriented through most of the first book, and through the first half of the following two novels as new characters and locations were introduced.  Even though I'm a big believer in "show-don't tell" as the best way for an author to describe people and places and events, I think Mr. Cook took this concept to an unfriendly extreme.  Throw me a frickin' bone here, Glen Cook.

This disorientation made the early parts of each novel drag a bit for me.  Though the plots were interesting, the characters were compelling, the action was enjoyable, and the writing was solid, I couldn't really get into the plot of each book until about two-thirds of the way through when I finally figured out what the hell was going on.

But the last parts of those books.  Wow.  Once all the pieces come together, each book finishes with a real punch.  All of the books were hard to pick up for the first couple hundred pages, and impossible to put down for the last hundred.  As soon as I finished the trilogy, I wanted to go back and read it again so I could savor all the richness and nuance of this fantastic world that I missed on the first reading.  In spite of its flaws, I believe that The Chronicles of The Black Company deserves a spot on any fantasy reader's top bookshelf as a significant and groundbreaking contribution to the genre.

Rating this trilogy is difficult.  I give it one star for frustration, and five stars for its ultimate vision.  So I'll split the difference and give it three.  Browsing through the reader reviews on Goodreads, it seems that this series draws a bimodal response from readers in the wild.  People either love it or hate it, and chances are, you will too.

Editor's Afterword:

Hey folks, Brian here.

While, generally, I want Mike's reviews to be able to stand on their own with minimal befuddlement or meddling from my end, I also felt a responsibility to butt my own 2 cents in here (yes, I know), and offer an afterthought to this particular review. 

Glen Cook's Black Company series, and particularly the first of the books, The Black Company, are among my most beloved fantasy novels, and it was something of a foregone conclusion that when we were first discussing the idea of Mike's Geek Reads appearing on the CVG, it was be the first candidate to pop into my head as a recommendation deserving a review.  I myself first read it some 4-5 years ago, and to say that it blew my mind at the time would be a vast understatement.

I generally consider myself to be a pretty intelligent person and an astute reader.  In fact, I'm sure I suffer from that all-too-common geek epidemic of usually believing I'm the smartest person in the room most of the time.  (So far in my experience, Monster Mike is the only geek I've met firsthand who would ever be consistently right in that belief.)  The Black Company, though, crushed that illusion for me utterly from the very first word. 

And I do mean that literally: the very first word. 

"Legate".  I had to look it up.  I can't remember the last time a novel made me go look up a word, let alone a fantasy novel.  I knew right away I was in for one nutty ride (™ Vernon Hardapple).

It was more evident as I read on, these books were clearly far, far smarter than me.  I for one loved that challenge.  I glanced through the reviews on Goodreads for example on MM's recommendation in his review above, and found there a good deal of teeth gnashing about how the narrator never stops to explain the world (as per the first chapter of every Encyclopedia Brown book ever).  The reader is expected to pick it up as he or she goes along as though he or she were already part of the world being describe,d and already had the context to understand the perspective of the Chronicler .  It's a fair criticism and TBC uses this style of narration to a merciless extreme.  There were often chapters I had to stop and go back to re-read entirely because the proverbial penny as to what was really going on in a particular scene only dropped at the very end of what I had just read.  These are not easy books by any stretch of the imagination, and they do make you work for it, on nearly every page.  If you're looking for a bit of light reading, or something on par with the Dragonlance novels level of fantasy (as a random example), you will be frustrated and annoyed by the entire endeavor.  I personally was thrilled and delighted in a way I hadn't been since I got through Nabokov's "Ada ,or Ardor" alive and in one piece.

I loved the strange juxtapositions of this setting -- the grimdark world, where there are no good choices for a ragtag team of "heroes", just trying to get each other through alive, as well the arcane semi-familiarity of the world, the oddly incongruous place names (Charm, Oar, Roses), the unique and fascinating approach to how magic works…  The world under the thrall of the The Lady's legions always seemed so close to being understood, but also tantalizingly just out of reach.

And the description…  Holy cow.  From epic battles that would put the Pelennor Fields to shame (like the rebellion's final assault on the fortress at Charm), to the small scale unit actions peppered throughout the books (which at once deftly encompass both extremes of the brutal and the absurd), one gets the impression this was written by someone who knows what he is talking about.  He's been "in the shit", and that lends a whole level of authenticity to the action and the shorthand characters speak with, which a shlubby geek like myself could watch in awe but never hope to emulate.  One of the blurbs on the back of the omnibus refers to the books as "Vietnam War fiction on peyote" and it's not a moniker I could argue with in the slightest.

In any event, this brief "afterword" has evolved into a length far beyond what I originally intended.  I will wrap up simply by stating the notion I've had on multiple occasions that if Showtime or AMC were looking for a fantasy-oriented serial to convert into a TV show to combat HBO's Game of Thrones domination, they would be hard pressed to pick something more full of awesome than The Chronicles of the Black Company.  But hey, what do I know… I'm no TV executive.  I'm just some poor geek who keeps giving Glen Cook all my money.  *

Gamers!  Be sure to check out the The Black Company - OGL Campaign Setting From Green Ronin's Mythic Vistas series!

*  Seriously though.  I have notes for any network who wants to reach out to me. 

brian@chippewavalleygeek.com 

Let's do this.