‘Bone Eaters’ – Glen Cook

I’m in the office today which means that my bag was jammed full of laptop, and assorted paraphernalia, this morning. No room for the books that I should be reading then (and that pile seems to be growing…) but just enough room for a short story collection to dip in and out of whilst sat on the bus. I decided that ‘Operation Arcana’ hadn’t been out of the house for a while so it was way past time that it had a jaunt 😉

There are a whole load of stories, in ‘Operation Arcana’, that I still haven’t read (and it’s a book that’s been on my shelf for years now…) but it was six in the morning and I was at least an hour away from breakfast so in the end, I settled on the story that I bought the book for in the first place… What? I was tired 😉 I’ve been a fan of ‘The Black Company’ for years (although true to form, I still haven’t read ‘Port of Shadows’…) so picked up ‘Operation Arcana’, back in the day, when it looked like reading the odd short story here and there was the only way that I’d find out what happened next. Or ‘what happened in the gaps between books’, either way… And then Cook lumped those short stories together and gave us ‘Port of Shadows’, oh well… We’re here now and ‘Bone Eaters’ was my ‘Tuesday Morning Commute Read’ so why don’t I tell you all about it…?

The Black Company are on the run, from the forces of the Lady, and have been running for years now. This is a tale of what they came across while heading from one place to another but always ending up exactly where they didn’t want to be. A tale of hungry ghosts and revenge best served cold…

Not everything has to be a story. Sometimes seeds can be sown, for future tales, but in the middle of not a lot happening right now. And by happy chance, a soldier’s life can be a whole lot of nothing happening right now, interspersed with short sharp bursts of violence. And that is the space that Glen Cook likes to inhabit, with his Black Company books in particular where soldiers wait to see what happens next. And that is ‘Bone Eaters’ in a nutshell really, a little snapshot of a soldier’s life in between those moments where stuff happens.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this could be a little, well… dull but in Cook’s hands, I’d say that it’s anything but. It’s well rounded for a start, soldiers don’t just fight all the time and it’s not just that, our glimpse into the daily life of the Black Company shows us that comrades are just as likely to stab you in the back as enemies. The Black Company is a united front to outsiders but it’s also a group of dangerous people with literally nowhere else to go but be around other really dangerous people. Things may not explode but Cook is always showing us that it could happen at any time, especially with someone like Rusty whom everyone hates. And lets be honest, you can’t have just fighting all the time; you have to have those moments of downtime so you can build up to moments where a little more happens.

For myself (and I suspect, other long term followers of the Black Company), it’s always good to spend time with Croaker, Goblin, One-Eye and the rest. The Black Company isn’t the best kind of family (it’s absolutely dysfunctional to say the least) but it’s family nevertheless and it’s never a bad thing to come back and spend time with favourites. That’s Croaker in case you hadn’t guessed. Cook may not make many concessions to his readers (he tells his story, you can take it or leave it) but one thing he has always done is give Croaker a voice that you can get behind and root for, just a little bit. That is very much the case here, you can feel Croaker’s weariness and you want to walk with him, just to see if he gets there (wherever that is) ok.   

There are moments where things do kick off though and I still enjoy the way that Cook is so matter of fact about these; soldiers deal with this all the time so what’s the big deal? Even if it is a village of hungry ghosts looking for bodies to live in… The ‘Chasing Midnight’ strand is also interesting to follow and it looks like I may have to revisit ‘Port of Shadows’ and try and pick it up again from there? We’ll see.

‘Bone Eaters’ is one of those stories that you’re going to get a lot more out of if you’d read at least ‘The Black Company’ and ‘Shadows Linger’ but it is still relatively self-contained enough that you could come to the story cold and still have fun with it. For me, ‘Bone Eaters’ has me hankering for a full on re-read of the series so I can spend some proper time with the Company. I’ve got a few books that I need to read first but, we’ll see…