Who is Glen Cook?
A St Louis General Motors assembly-line worker who wrote novels in the gaps of the line — reportedly knocking out books on a clipboard between units — and changed fantasy's centre of gravity while nobody respectable was looking. The Black Company (1984) told epic fantasy from the mud: a mercenary outfit under contract to the empire's terrifying sorceress, narrated by the company physician-annalist Croaker in flat soldier's prose, where the Dark Lord is the employer and the moral high ground is above everyone's pay grade. Veterans wrote to say he'd got it right; Steven Erikson and Joe Abercrombie built careers on the permission it granted. His Garrett, P.I. books meanwhile invented the fantasy hard-boiled detective, and the Dread Empire preceded it all.
Why they matter
The founding document of military fantasy and grimdark's true ancestor: the Black Company's grunt's-eye view is the most influential perspective shift in post-Tolkien fantasy, acknowledged as bedrock by Erikson, Abercrombie and the entire dark-fantasy mainstream.
Essential books — and where to start
1984 · The Black Company, book 1 · Fantasy · Grimdark, Military SF, Heroic Fantasy
The Black Company — four centuries of mercenary tradition, its Annals carried like a regimental soul — takes service with the Lady, the resurrected sorceress-empress whose Ten Who Were Taken make the average dark lord look like middle management. Croaker, company physician and Annalist, records the dirty war against the Rebel with a medic's economy: the magic is artillery, the comrades are named like soldiers (One-Eye, Goblin, Raven), the atrocities are logged on both sides, and the prophesied child of light may be standing closer to the company than anyone would like. Fantasy finally written by someone who'd carried a pack.
1987 · Garrett, P.I., book 1 · Fantasy · Urban Fantasy, Comic Fantasy
Garrett — ex-Marine, professional finder of things and people in the city of TunFaire, allergic to mornings and most employers — is hired to deliver an inheritance to a dead comrade's mysterious beneficiary, which means going back to the Cantard war zone he barely survived the first time, in company with the dead man's terrifying relatives and the half-dark-elf killer Morley Dotes. Cook pours Chandler straight into a fantasy glass: vampires and centaurs on the mean streets, a sleeping partner who is a four-hundred-pound dead Loghyr who reads minds, and narration in pure private-eye vernacular. The hangover, the dame, the double-cross — all present, all armed.
Series
b. 1974 · British
The defining grimdark author after Martin: Abercrombie perfected the character-voice-driven, blackly comic register that dominates modern adult fantasy, and his fight scenes and moral hangovers are the subgenre's house style.
b. 1959 · Canadian
The Malazan Book of the Fallen is epic fantasy's most ambitious completed structure — the genre's standing answer to the question of how big, how deep and how uncompromising the form can go and still find a mass readership.
b. 1952 · British
The most original British horror voice of his generation: Barker rewired the genre's relationship with the body and desire, founded the dark-fantasy register a generation now writes in, and gave horror cinema one of its enduring mythologies.
