A Cruel Wind by Glen Cook6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() This was an omnibus of the first 3 Dread Empire novels from Glen Cook. As always with Cook, the prose is straightforward and unornamented (although the book & chapter titles are quite poetic) and the military maneuvers are well thought-out and engaging and most of the characters are relatively normal people who may or may not realize just how far in over their heads they are. This all takes place on a larger scale than the Black Company books it's written in third person so he can juggle several viewpoint characters and show how events in one part of the world (or in the distant past) are influencing events in another part of the world. The Dread Empire itself is vaguely Chinese in flavor the rest of the world has vaguely Nordic and Germanic and Mediterranean countries. The titular Dread Empire is barely mentioned in the first book but plays a larger role in the second & third. Also, there's a major shift in viewpoint characters between the first book ( A Shadow of All Night Falling) and the second & third ( October's Baby and All Darkness Met) - the main viewpoint characters in 2 & 3 (and in the books collected in the second omnibus) were secondary charaters in book 1. The structure is interesting - each book alternates between contemporary chapters, and chapters that flash back to events decades or centuries in the past that laid the groundwork for current events. ![]() pre-Black Company) Glen Cook - an omnibus collection of the original trilogy in his other major fantasy series, The Dread Empire. ![]()
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