You might be tired of dark stories, I might be tired of dark stories, but, nonetheless, the dark stories just keep coming. Since that’s apparently the state of things, we might as well try to get dark stories right. Oversaturation aside, there isn’t anything inherently bad about them. A darker tale is often more gripping than a lighter one, and some stories won’t work at all without a little darkness. However, dark stories do present special challenges, and the darker you go, the more stringent those challenges are. Audiences simply expect more from stories that feature distressing subject matter, especially when the real world is distressing all on its own.
In my quest to better understand dark stories, I picked up Glen Cook’s The Black Company, the first book in a series of the same name.* While this was hardly the first dark fantasy novel, it did a lot to popularize the subgenre. Like usual, I was not impressed. The book suffers from a number of technical mistakes such as forgetting to foreshadow big twists and summarizing major plot points. Nevertheless, The Black Company still has a few lessons to teach us about dark stories, both in its successes and in its failures.
Relatable Protagonists Are Essential
A major hallmark of dark stories is the lack of a noble goal that the hero can fight for. This isn’t universal by any means, but it’s common enough to be easily recognizable. Sometimes none of the various factions involved in a conflict are better than the others, and the world will be a dismal place no matter no matter who wins.
The most apparent downside of this trope is that when everyone’s a minusculely different shade of gray, the audience doesn’t have a big conflict they can get invested in. To compensate for this, dark stories need to keep their characters as grounded as possible. That way, readers will sympathize with the regular people caught up in a miserable world, something we can all understand.
Black Company does a decent job of this, especially at the beginning. Our heroes – and I use the term loosely – are a bunch of mercenaries that mostly lack any special abilities besides professionalism and determination. Even the company’s wizards are considered middling at best. They’re all stuck in a contract to an erratic employer who drags them into political squabbles that the company wants nothing to do with. The characters also have less than heroic names like One-Eye, Goblin, Elmo, and our protagonist, Croaker.
Once Cook establishes the characters, he also shows how the company struggles to deal with a demon that’s plaguing the city. They are but mortal men, not great heroes of destiny! This serves the book well by giving readers sympathetic characters to latch onto. Cook does sabotage it a little by adding the uncharacteristically cool and badass Raven to the company,* but the effect still holds for a while.
It’s not until Cook introduces his Nazgul parallel, the Ten Who Were Taken, that things really go wrong. The Taken are all epic dark wizards, and the further into the book you get, the more it focuses on them, even though Croaker is still technically our POV character. The Black Company itself also goes through a strange transformation from competent mercenaries to gods of the battlefield, winning a number of improbable victories with total ease. This mostly happens offscreen, but it still makes the company less relatable.
Likability Must Be Carefully Maintained
Content Notice: Sexual violence in fiction
Some authors have an idea that likability doesn’t matter for dark stories, that their protagonist can eat babies and kick puppies without any repercussions. Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. No matter how gritty and realistic your story is, people still have to like the main characters enough to spend the time watching or reading about them.
Fortunately, Cook understands this at least on some level. Soldiers of the Black Company only kill when they have to, and they take no pleasure in it. Cook also plays up the fraternal bonds between the characters, showing that despite their gruff demeanor and petty feuds, any of them would risk life and limb to protect their brothers.
There’s even a sequence where several characters venture into a recently conquered town to protect civilians from their own allies. They explain that the civilians at risk include children, and that some things simply cannot be tolerated, even in war. This causes a lot of trouble for the company, and our heroes are stuck dealing with the fallout for several chapters.
Establishing the Black Company as reasonably moral people fighting for an immoral employer is critical for holding the reader’s engagement, and it makes the characters more interesting. An evil character who does evil things evilly doesn’t have any depth, whereas a conflicted character who tries to navigate morally fraught situations is an efficient drama generator.
Too bad Cook later throws all his hard work away when the main characters shrug at rapes committed by their fellow mercenaries. That’s just something that happens in war, you know, nothing to be done about it. Not like the Black Company is famous for its discipline or anything. Oh wait, yes it is! There’s even an implication that maybe these women deserve to be raped because they were fighting in the war, which is all kinds of gross. It’s a serious low point for the book, and it flies in the face of how the characters were previously established.
Protagonist Goals Need to Be Sympathetic
Another downside of not having a clear good vs evil battle in your story is creating conflicts that audiences will care about. It’s difficult to make gray vs gray conflicts compelling, and even harder with evil vs evil.
The Black Company’s main conflict is a Sauron analogue called the Lady fighting against a group of rebels who are supposedly just as bad as she is.* The Black Company is fighting on the Lady’s side, but even if we accept the moral equivalency, the main conflict is really boring. Who cares which side wins, since they’re apparently the same?
Early in the book, Cook gets around this issue by focusing on smaller-scale conflicts. This is easy, since the Black Company is only fighting one small part of a much larger war. First the Black Company has to get free of their previous employer, then they have to deal with infighting between the Taken, then they have to withstand a grueling retreat in the face of a victorious rebel army. The actual war doesn’t matter; it’s all about what happens to the company and its individual characters.
The most engaging sections come when the Black Company has to balance between dealing with hostile rebels and avoiding other enemies who are also in the Lady’s service. In one instance, they play both sides off each other, and it makes for excellent reading. But then Cook falls into the trap of focusing too much on the war itself, and nothing matters anymore.
Not only is the war morally uninteresting, but the larger battles are so far above the company’s pay grade that they don’t even seem real. Technically the company’s survival is on the line, but that threat is never urgent. Worse, Cook focuses more and more on the Taken’s internal politics, which don’t involve the company at all. More than once, Croaker is dragged along for no reason other than Cook wanting the POV character there to witness the machinations of his epic dark wizards.
Near the end, we do find out that the Lady might be fighting to prevent the rise of something even more evil than she is. That could have given the war actual stakes, but it’s too little, too late. It’s also not clear if this is even true, since the Lady herself is the main source of information on it, and she’s a liar.
Gray Conflicts Require Robust Moral Context
If it were up to me, all storytellers would pay more attention to their moral context. Even in light stories, it’s irritating when characters do something that should have serious ramifications, but the author isn’t interested in exploring them. It’s a lot worse in dark stories, where the storyteller makes an implicit contract with the audience: if you agree to experience some distressing content, I’ll do the work to make it fulfilling.
Until now, the pattern has been that Black Company starts off well and then stumbles later, but this time Cook is in trouble from day one. Remember how I said that the rebels were “supposedly” as bad as the Lady? I had to qualify that because I have no idea how bad either side actually is.
When it comes to moral context, Cook is all tell and no show. We’re told that the Lady is evil, and we’re told the rebels are evil, but we almost never see them do anything that I would qualify as good or evil. In Lord of the Rings, we know what will happen if Sauron wins: everyone will be enslaved, and probably eaten. In the Black Company, we know there’s a war happening, but the consequences are exceptionally vague.
We do see the Lady’s troops retaliating against civilians once, and we see the rebels torture a prisoner once, but that’s about it, and it’s difficult to tell if these are isolated incidents. The Taken are certainly jerks on a personal level, but we have no idea how that translates to governance. When the characters discuss morality, it’s in very abstract terms, like they’re talking about D&D alignments.
Not only does this give the world a flimsy quality, but it makes the ending much harder to take seriously. During the final battle, Croaker decides the Lady is truly evil, and he wants the company to leave her service. But without context, it’s hard to understand how he reached that conclusion. She hasn’t done anything differently. It feels like he took a level of paladin and now has Detect Evil on his spell list.
Silly Plot Points Do More Damage
All stories benefit from good plotting, and all stories suffer from bad plotting, but dark stories suffer more. It’s annoying when a Marvel hero ignores an option for defeating their nemesis, but it’s reasonably easy to roll with since the MCU is a tropey playground that rarely asks you to get too real with your feelings. Dark stories, on the other hand, usually draw much of their appeal from the idea that they are more realistic, and so their plots are under more scrutiny.
For all of its apparent darkness, The Black Company is remarkably bad in the plotting department. Not only do many critical events take place offscreen or entirely in summary, but the company itself often seems to teleport around so it can be wherever Cook wants it. In one section, the company is surrounded and besieged by overwhelming enemy forces, and then without explanation, the company has escaped and is somewhere else.
In other sections, the company can supposedly spy on their enemies using magic, which gives them a major advantage. Then we find out that wizards are a dime a dozen in this setting, but somehow none of the rebels have considered that the company might have supernatural aid. It just keeps going like this for page after page.
By far the silliest moment is when the company gets ahold of some hairs from an illusive rebel wizard named Raker. The characters make a big deal about how they’ve finally got Raker now; he might be really good at hiding, but his hairs will be his undoing. From that setup, you might be expecting some kind of tracking spell, sympathetic curse, or even cloning a magical duplicate, but that’s only because you’re a total infant that doesn’t think on The Black Company’s level.
Instead, the company dumps a bunch of gold on the ground, creates a magical field around it, and then uses the hairs to alter the field so only someone with Raker’s corpse can claim the gold. You might recognize this as offering a bounty, something they could have done at any time. They even know what Raker looks like, so identification wouldn’t be an issue. But now they act like Raker is finished for sure; even his closest allies will turn on him to get that gold. This never happens, and instead the characters kill Raker in a mostly unrelated street fight, but everyone still acts as though the plan has been a great success.
I read that section a few extra times just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. It is some spectacularly bad writing. While the plotting never sinks that low again, I had a hard time taking all the dark and gritty content seriously because I kept remembering the time they dumped a bunch of gold on the ground and thought it was clever.
Darkness Does Not Equal Meaning
Storytellers and audiences both have an unfortunate tendency to assume that if something is dark, it must be more mature and meaningful. I first noticed this back in 2005, when advertisements for Revenge of the Sith couldn’t stop talking about how dark it was, as if that somehow made it better than previous Star Wars films. You can see it in the current run of Star Trek as well, where the writers pat themselves on the back for having such deep commentary as they torture characters to death.
It’s true that darker content can be useful in certain discussions, but making things darker doesn’t automatically make the story meaningful. In The Black Company, we see this play out in Croaker’s obsession with the Lady. Croaker writes some weird fan fiction about the Lady’s backstory and how in love with her he is, and then Cook tries to dress it up with some pseudo philosophy about what a horrible world it is that can transform innocent little girls into evil warlords. What kind of tragic past must the Lady have?
We’re then supposed to be surprised when it turns out that the Lady is just a bad person who wants power. How insightful? The book certainly acts like this is a major point, but all that’s really happened is Croaker’s creepy, sexist preconception is wrong. Even if that’s supposed to be the point, it’s not of any value. At best, the book entertained the misogynistic idea that women are somehow inherently less evil, only to then show the idea as false. You might as well have a story start out with the premise that eating flies is an effective beauty routine. Even if you prove the idea is wrong, there was nothing gained from entertaining it in the first place.
This is emblematic of The Black Company’s problems: the book aspires to being deep and meaningful, but it can’t follow through on anything. Instead of creating a morally complex world, we get a morally vague one. This way the main characters can serve a dark lord (lady) without doing anything too bad. At the same time, we have a book that purports to show us the difficulty of life for rank-and-file soldiers, but is callous to the suffering of anyone outside the company. Cook tries for a more realistic take on dark fantasy, but ends up with a storyline where the main characters win by dumping a bunch of gold on the ground.
Few of the story’s dark elements serve a purpose beyond causing the reader some emotional distress. They are window dressing, or as Chris put it in another post, grimdark sauce. Even in the best of times, such unnecessary darkness only limits your story’s audience for no gain. These days, when many of your potential readers have been stuck at home for months thanks to a maliciously mismanaged pandemic, it’s likely to get the story thrown against a wall and then set on fire.
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I have to admit I never went past the first book of the Black Company myself. I found the series through another of Cook’s: Garrett, P.I.
Even though this series also goes into the direction of noir, it’s a series with a much smaller focus, namely the main character Garrett, a former soldier turned P.I. and the people around him – friends, foes, clients. It does have quite a bit of humour and a nice cast of characters around Garrett (my personal favourite being Morley Dotes, a part-time assassin and full-time owner of a vegetarian restaurant).
There’s definitely a seedy underbelly to the city Garrett lives in and as a P.I. he definitely gets drawn there regularly, yet the series still manages to balance the dark aspects with the lighter ones. It’s quite different from the Black Company, as it were (and I just found out from looking up how Garrett was written that all books are now finally on kindle – yay!).
That’s too bad. The books only get better and I’m on book four and honestly there is no more rape mentioned. Darling’s tragic introduction is the last instance I recall. And the Black Company doesn’t delve into rotten details. Any time they raid a town or something a random merc will run off with a girl over there shoulder. I’m not trying to play down rape, it’s disgusting no matter what. But I’m surprised to see the Glen Cook catch flak and Stephen King gets a pass.
Honestly, I feel that Berserk (or the golden age arc, at least) did what the Black Company tried to do better. Mainly because it kept the focus on a small handful of characters with the war (which in this story is just a basic two kingdoms clashing with nothing else elaborated on) as the backdrop. And while the main characters aren’t paragons of virtue, there’s still enough about them that makes it easy to root for them. The worst they do is Guts killing a child and even then it was done on impulse and he regrets his actions. He even jeopardizes his escape to comfort the boy in his last moments. And while Griffith is far more ruthless, his intelligence and charisma make him an intriguing character. Finally, when the supernatural show up in the story, it’s clear that the Band of the Hawk, while skilled, are out of their depth.
The only major complaint is how one of the major two female characters is treated. Poor Casca can’t seem to face any enemy that isn’t threatening to rape her. At the very least the Band treats her respectfully, but I could’ve done without the bad guys she faced telling her that they were going to show her her place.
I like dark stories, but I usually won’t read the ones written by men, because they seem to really enjoy writing about rape. I once opened a very popular dark novel and the first scene was the MC raping a young girl and mocking her for screaming like a pig (or something along those lines — I think he commented on her being fat or something). Why would I read a whole novel about that rapist? There is nothing the author could do with the story to make it fulfilling for me, even if the MC were to be raped and killed as well, which I doubt.
I think the problem with men writing rape in dark stories is that they see it as a shortcut to ‘see how dark my story is! see my horribly dark and gritty world!’ In addition, the rape scene provides them with the chance to put in sex – even if it’s non-consenting. ‘Sex’ equals ‘adult story’ for a lot of people (perhaps because it’s one of the basic differences between a novel for children/teens and a regular novel – not that all novels for adults need sex scenes, mind).
While it pays to remember than men can be raped, too (by other men and by women), the chances of a man being raped go down quickly once they’ve passed into adulthood, whereas a woman is basically in danger of being raped from cradle to grave. For men, the danger and the implication of what rape means in the long run is just not as present and so they’re not aware of what kind of message they send with such scenes. For them, it’s just ‘dark!’, for others, it’s a turn-off for the story.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I think rape is used as a shortcut to show how awful the villain is by storytellers who don’t want to bother with making the villain a real character or anything other than a cliche. And based on the number of rape and attempted rape scenes in movies, it certainly seems that screenwriters don’t understand that those scenes are re-traumatizing for a not insignificant portion of their audience.
Many women, including myself, will avoid a movie or TV show if I know ahead of time that it has any sort of sexual violence in it. Unfortunately, I often don’t know. Thankfully, the type of books I read usually don’t have any sexual violence in them, so unexpected violence is easier for me to avoid in prose (I’m sure this varies depending on the genre, though).
I don’t read Stephen King for this very reason. The man seems to enjoy child molestation a little too much for me to contribute to his wealth.
“Like usual, I was not impressed.”
There is a palpable lack of joy in that line.
I must admit that as a Black Company addict I am struggling with the negativity of the article. I get that you didn’t like the series. I also strongly suspect that you didn’t get it either; I have read it many times over and still find new threads and links. What you seem to think is a device, namely writing from the soldiers perspective, is in fact the whole point and indeed the author is a time-served Marine themselves, so knows how to make the characters authentic. As for the world and its protagonists being shades of grey, that’s far more realistic than most fantasy literature in my experience; there’s no bimbo princesses here, just tough as nails Sorceresses who will kill on a whim !
The rape aspect is challenging, to be fair. But given that just about every episode of Game of Thrones, Rome, Spartacus etc seemed to have rape in it, personally I feel the author glossed over it rather more than many currently.
As for the assertion around The Ten being Nazghul clones, seriously, read it again. You couldn’t be more wrong.
Personally, I’ve never gotten past the first book of the Black Company, but I like Cook’s “P.I. Garrett” series. He also writes morally grey characters there (and Garrett is a former soldier himself) and certainly has a lot of tough women there (and not only in the ‘female badass’ way, but also schemers and others), yet I found that I just couldn’t stomach the way the Black Company was written (hence I didn’t go past book 1).
It’s okay to like the series, everyone has a different taste. Yet the argument ‘you just didn’t get it’ is not a good one. Everyone has their own interpretation of a piece of media. What you see in the series, from your interests, your background, you taste, might diverge vastly from what I see in the series – or what Oren does. For him, this is how he reads the content. For me, it’s different (but I won’t go into details – it was a long time ago). Continue to love the series if it speaks out to you. Nobody says you shouldn’t.
As far as rape goes – if you check this site, you will find that Oren and Chris never condone rape here. It’s an overused trope (as your list of media proves) and also a form of violence which is gendered (and only hits the underprivileged gender). The Black Company, from what I remember, doesn’t need the rape to transport its ‘dark and gritty’ setting – just as many of your other examples. Just using gendered violence to make things more gritty is … not the optimal way to go.
And just to clarify in case it’s not clear in the post: What makes Black Company particularly bad in regards to sexual violence isn’t how often it happens or how graphically its described. Thankfully, those are both low. Instead, the main issue is that the main characters, the ones we are supposed to like an identify with, specifically shrug rape off as either not a big deal or possibly even deserved.
I must respectfully disagree with many of the premises on this blog that are presented as sort of facts, since many readers (including myself) disagree on those things. Its a matter of preference of reader and writer. Some people like reading about villains or borderline villains and I feel this article completely ignores that.
1) Relatable protagonists are essential
I would say this is false, since a lot of people who are perfectly decent in real life like reading about evil-leaning or evil characters. Instead, I think it’s important that the protagonists feel believable and alive. That Cook accomplishes very well. The company of soldiers speaks in a very believable way, the scenes are vivid for how little description there is, and each character acts for the most part in a way that could be expected from a person like them. You come to care about them, but do not relate to them, or condone all of their choices. Still, you can understand why they made those choices. This is different from relatability. Some people like reading about people like themselves who would make same moral choices as they, some people prefer reading about someone totally different. I think latter is just as valid as former.
2) Likeability must be carefully maintained
I can perfectly see why the Black Company made the choice to not intervene on the sexual assaults by the mercenaries. They are veterans of many wars and they have seen a lot of it, no doubt. They know it would be in vain and get them in deep trouble. I don’t condone their choice in the slightest, but I can perfectly understand why they made it – and that is enough to maintain character integrity and interestibility. Characters can do shitty shit and still be interesting, as long as they have believable reasons (not necessarily good reasons) for it.
3) Protagonist’s goals need to be sympathetic. I say they are – to get by in a cold, tough world, to protect the lives of their brothers in arms and those of themselves. That is their motivation in the book, and while they do a lot of evil for their employer, they do it because its their job and that is all. They do not do evil for the pleasure of it or just because. That still makes them morally sketchy, of course – but the reasons for it are perfectly sympathetic, even if their means are not and that creates the atmosphere this book does so well. They are not evil by nature, but do evil to get by. Does not absolve them of it, but gives believable reasons for it. I love it.
4) Gray Conflicts Require Robust Moral Context
No, no, no! Many wars in human history have been fought for no better cause than satisfaction of a ruler’s vanity. (Of course it is more complex than that, but suffice to say, many many wars have lacked robust moral context in the past.) The needlessness of the bloodshed and the vanity of it all is a crucial part of the bleak atmosphere. If there is something moral to fight for, it immediately becomes more bright and hopeful – something that enjoyers of dark and nihilistic stories. It is crucial that the conflict is stupid and pointless and the soldiers are in it because its their job for the atmosphere of this book! Changing it would ruin the bleak mood of it.
1) Relatable protagonists are essential
I think you misunderstand what is meant by relatable here – later in your comment, say this, regarding sympathetic goals – “I say they are – to get by in a cold, tough world, to protect the lives of their brothers in arms and those of themselves.”
A goal of getting by is what *makes* these particular characters relatable. relatable doesn’t mean never making questionable choices, or being just like us – it means some contextual aspect of their lives we can connect to as a way into the more outre elements.
Gray Conflicts Require Robust Moral Context
Fiction requires the reader to care about what it going on. In the case of a war, it has to matter to the reader who wins – a moral difference between the sides isn’t necessarily the only way to do that, but it is a way that comes with built in stakes, and ties into other goals like making the characters relatable, likable, and/or sympathetic (note that these are not synonyms when it comes to fictional characters). But ultimately there has to be an answer to the question of why a reader should care how it ends.
It’s also worth noting that we *are* told there is a moral difference between the two sides. We’re just not shown it.
This was an interesting read. Can follow on some point, though I think I probably mostly agree with Jelena here.
Regarding your point that in a war it has to matter to the reader who wins, I think you miss the point Cook drives home in his writing – in war, most soldiers (which is what the POV characters are) don’t care for who wins – they care about survival and doing their job. War is hell, and maintaining idealism in such environments is difficult. The other point he tries to make is that any person/cause capable of creating war is inevitably an evil. Perhaps the lesser of two evils, but still evil. We *are* told that there is a moral difference between the two sides, but a thorough theme throughout is that evil is (mostly) POV. Even when the Company ends up fighting on the side of “least evil”, the story never shys away from the fact that the Company itself is considered evil by those they fight – and for good reasons.
TBF, I suppose some of those bits aren’t necessarily too clear in TBC. I won’t recommend reading the rest, because I doubt you’d like them based on some of the comments above, but the first books isn’t really self-contained, IMO; the first three are a trilogy. The central conflict in LoTR would also seem pretty unsatisfying if all you read was the Fellowship of the Ring.
Anyway, thanks for the writeup. I did enjoy it, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all of the criticisim.
It’s true that for most soldiers in war the only thing which matters is surviving – and that, therefore, a group of mercenaries like the Black Company is first and foremost looking out for their own survival, too. Yet, as a reader who has never been a soldier or other part of the military, I do not feel a draw when a war is ‘doesn’t matter who wins as long as I still breathe at the end’ matter. I want a higher stake than ‘will the company survive.’
In addition, as someone who has studied a lot of history, I’d be careful with the ‘everyone who is capable of starting a war is evil’ thing. You probably have to be of dubitable or grey morals to start a war, but there are situations where war might look like the only option you have and in most wars, those who start them at least look out for people on their side, if not for those on the other, obviously.
I’m also always weary of a series where the first book leaves a big overhang to be resolved in the next one(s). You never know whether a series catches on and that will ever be resolved (it got in this case, yes, but there are a lot ‘first books of a series without follow-up’ out there). Yes, only reading Fellowship would also be unsatisfying, but LotR is more ‘cut into parts for publishing’ and not really a series of books. It’s one enormous book which comes in three volumes most of the time.
Regarding your first point, I think it’s totally fair _as a reader_ not to find this kind of thing compelling. People like different things. But I don’t think it’s fair to criticize this as a flaw of the writing, when it is explicitly the point of the story to reflect what it would be like to be one of the grunts in a fantasy war, and succeeds very well at that (considering how popular this is among veterans). Most of us will (hopefully) never experience how it is to be a soldier in war. It can still be interesting to read about it, though, considering that almost no other SF writers bother trying to reflect that viewpoint.
Not sure what you’re trying to argue in point two. There has never been a war in history, in which both sides have not committed atrocities (even when one side is clearly “more evil”). Speculative fiction (and history as well) almost always whitewashes that part, which IMO does us a disservice as readers because it makes it easy to glorify war and the people who wage it. I find the opinion in the article that the TBC is “grimdark sauce” very weird, given that Cook only rarely rubs the reader’s nose in the nastiness (unlike most modern media which seems to relish in showing everything in excruciating detail), but still manages to communicate how grim war actually is and what kind of people are fighting it.
I can agree on the third part in the general case, though I don’t really see how this applies to the Black Company – the three first books were published 40 years ago as a series (all three were published inside a year). Nowadays, they’re pretty much only available as an omnibus edition.
It’s obvious, I suppose, that I think the Chronicles is a pretty great series, though it’s not without its flaws. I don’t think it’s a story about “reasonable moral” people, though but it works despite that. Croaker is also an “unreliable narrator” with a very strong “voice”, which I think the critique kind of misses. It’s one of those deliberate stylistic choices of Cook which makes the story itself less approachable; though I’m not sure that’s really a flaw. Gene Wolfe is a similar case – his books are often very difficult to read, but is it a failure of the book if the elements that make it difficult to get into are intentional?
There are a fair number of plot holes, and the magic “system” is never very well defined. The Raker subplot that is reacted to in the article is particularly clunky, but that actually has an explanation: it was originally a self-contained short story, that latter got incorporated (not entirely successfully) into the novel. Cook also doesn’t always succeed with the tone/style that he tries to go for, though his ability to shift style from narrator to narrator in the series is impressive. In that respect, the first book is probably actually the weakest.
I do agree with the premise of the article, that grimdark requires “more” from the author, in the sense of selling it to the reader. I think that the fact that you can hardly find a list of “best grimdark” without finding the chronicles on it, shows that it succeeds very well. And – if one is to draw a lesson from it –
I think it succeeds mostly because it manages to have a “voice” that feels very authentic to the experience it tries to describe.
I’ve actually never read the Garrett P.I. books. Perhaps I should get on to that, though. My understanding is that they’re a very different read from Cook’s work on the chronicles.
For point two: Is Ukraine ‘evil’ for fighting back against Russia right now? Were the French, the British, or the Americans ‘evil’ for fighting against Nazi Germany? Is any country defending itself against an attacker ‘evil’ for taking up weapons? War is started by one side, but usually fought by several. To go even further: Is a country conquered a generation ago ‘evil’ when they start a war to drive their conquerors out of their country? Yes, atrocities are committed in war – and usually from both sides. We’re humans, we’re not 100% perfect. That doesn’t make us ‘evil,’ though – it does make us normal and not unrealistic paragons of virtue. Not every war has ‘two evils’ on top which people have to choose between. Some wars have only one evil.
As for ‘grimdark sauce:’ You’re probably going to argue that showing a rape happening without the heroes (for a certain value of heroes, I’m aware the mercenaries don’t count as your regular heroes) doing anything about it is just part of the realism of war.
Yet, why does it have to be rape? Because that is how everyone and their dog show that their world is grim and not clearly divided between the ‘good’ and the ‘evil.’
You could just as well have them ignore the mass-slaughter of innocent, helpless civilians, but a gendered bit of violence is the go-to for authors who want a short-cut to ‘this world is dark as heck.’ Babies being smashed into a wall to kill them? Happens in real wars. Not to be found in your regular grim-world war scenario. Whole village driven together outside the village, being forced to shovel their own grave, then being mowed down and buried while some of them are still breathing? Happens in in real wars. Not to be found in your regular grim-world war scenario. Rape of women? Hell, yes, let’s put that in here. I wonder why that is? Perhaps because it’s a bit of violence the male author will never encounter?
The rape in this book could be replaced with every other bit of war crime, but it is a rape, because that is a short-cut for ‘my world is grim and dark’ – this time with the addition of ‘it’s so grim and dark that my heroes seen nothing special about that woman being raped, it’s business as usual.’
Neither Ukraine, US or the UK started those wars. Did/Are soldiers on the “good” side do/doing questionable moral things? Also yes. It unfortunately happens in war. I’d quibble with referring to a rebellion as starting a war – but I’ll grant that one can be argued. Though I’ll note that throughout history, one man’s “freedom fighter” has always been viewed as another man’s “terrorist”. What history describes you as, depends on whether you win or not; a point Croaker (the main narrator in the Chronicles) is very aware of.
“There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.”
Wrt grimdark sauce, I agree that some writers seem to do this – but I disagree that this is what Cook does. The first chapter has the Company slaughter civilians and permit the murder of their employer and his entire household. A little later on, when the Company follows the spoor of one of the Empire’s mad sorcerers you get the company encountering all the rest – mass slaughter of soldiers, civilians and livestock, toddlers with smashed skulls, and pretty much any other atrocity you care to mention. And he pretty early on notes the Company is not much better:
“You who come after me, scribbling these Annals, by now realize that I shy off portraying the whole truth about our band of blackguards. You know they are vicious, violent, and ignorant. They are complete barbarians, living out their cruelest fantasies, their behavior tempered only by the presence of a few decent men. I do not often show that side because these men are my brethren, my family, and I was taught young not to speak ill of kin. The old lessons die hardest.”
TBH – this is one reason I hope they never make a TV show of this; with today’s TV sensibilities it’d just end up an excuse for a gore/violence fest, losing all of what makes the work what it is.
This was written in the 1980s, so it is dated in some ways, but in the way it treats violence and atrocities (mostly implied rather than lovingly detailed), I actually think that is a plus. Compared to some of today’s novels (including, e.g., ASoIaF), the Chronicles are in some ways pretty tame.
But obviously, that is just my 25 cents.