Synopsis:
When sorcerers and demigods go to war, those wars are fought by mercenaries, dog soldiers, grunts in the trenches. And the stories of those soldiers are the stories of Glen Cook's hugely popular Black Company novels. If the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 were to tell the story of The Lord of the Rings, it might read like the Black Company books. There is nothing else in fantasy like them.Now, at last, Cook brings the Glittering Stone cycle within the Black Company series to an end...but an end with many other tales left to tell. As Soldiers Live opens, Croaker is military dictator of all the Taglias, and no Black Company member has died in battle for four years. Croaker figures it can't last. He's right.For, of course, many of the Company's old adversaries are still around. Narayan Singh and his adopted daughter -- actually the offspring of Croaker and the Lady -- hope to bring about the apocalyptic Year of the Skulls. Other old enemies like Shadowcatcher, Longshadow, and Howler are also ready to do the Company harm. And much of the Company is still recovering from the fifteen years many of them spent in a stasis field.Then a report arrives of an evil spirit, a forvalaka, that has taken over one of their old enemies. It attacks them at a shadowgate -- setting off a chain of events that will bring the Company to the edge of apocalypse and, as usual, several steps beyond.
Review:
"Cook deserves high marks for much in this novel, including the gritty realism of the soldiers' dialogue and of the attitude of the civilians (who seem to suffer much as the Vietnamese did during the Vietnam War). The distinctively non-Western flavor of much of the mythology is also welcome. Large parts of the book read like a collaboration between Michael Moorcock and the late John Masters, dean of historical novelists of the British Raj. Indeed, the book offers virtually everything a fantasy reader could ask for...".-- Publishers Weekly on She Is the Darkness
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