A review by bentgaidin
Port of Shadows by Glen Cook

4.0

This was interesting to read as a return to the Black Company; the series was originally published in the 80s/90s as dark military fantasy about a mercenary group that signs on to work for the evil empire and gets caught up in the sorcerous crossfire between the various factions of evil overlords ruling the place. It's very much a progenitor of the Grimdark fantasy genre, about fighting being bloody and awful, self-interest being rewarded far more than good intentions, and the overall dog-eat-dog nature of the world; it's also vaguely mysogynist in that way where women are good for something, over there off the page, and we can just think of them as sex objects, and a woman with enough power to not be a sex object is objectively terrifying. So this is the world we're returning to, in a story set in the middle of events that we've already known how they turn out, which makes for an interesting challenge; there are some things the characters worry about that we know can't happen, and others that they discover that the reader already knew going in. It's not predicated on any foreknowledge -- it'd probably be a decent entry-point for new readers, with a bit of extra suspense and a bit of extra confusion and revelation for those not familiar -- but it's certainly an experience to come back to the characters, knowing where they'll end up in a few books. I'd probably recommend the old books as a start instead, though, if only because this doesn't get up to quite as many tricks and surprises as the original trilogy. Also. it's very true to those characters, which makes it strange to read their dismissal and objectification of the women at the heart of the story here in 2018; I'm not sure how you could correct that given the very close first-person nature of the writing, but I wish Cook could have somehow. If you have nostalgia for the Black Company this is worth a look, or if you've heard of the series but don't want to actually embark on a, granted, short by modern fantasy standards, ten-book read (and there's omnibuses now, too) it does hit all the major beats. Other than that, it won't necessarily astound you, but it's a competent dark fantasy.