The Black Company is an all-time favorite series of the QTL team, and I would argue it’s probably the single most foundational story in how we came to be a group reviewing books. So, it’s not an understatement to say that there was a disproportionate amount of scrutiny being lobbed toward a brand new Black Company book for the first time in twenty-five years. Yet, despite being examined under a harsh lens, Lies Weeping is a great success and has landed firmly on our best books of 2025.
Glen Cook’s timeless anti-war epic, The Black Company, is a uniquely weird series that plays with narrative delivery to an absurd degree. If you are unfamiliar, you should read our breakdown, but the general gist is that the series is a set of historical accounts from chroniclers of a mercenary company called The Black Company as they serve under various villains across several wars. What makes the books so delightful is a heavy use of both unreliable narration and the fact that each of the different narrators of the annals has a voice so different that you would swear different authors wrote the books. Each narrator has different cadences, focuses within their records, styles of writing, and more. It results in a very transportive piece that I often consider to have one of the greatest endings of all time in Soldiers Live.
Thankfully, I can say right off the bat that Lies Weeping does nothing to diminish the ending of the previous story arc of The Black Company. This book serves functionally as a soft reset of the story, carrying on with the remaining members of the Company at the end of the previous book, and is content to launch into its own strange story. Several of everyone’s favorite characters are back, but as is tradition in this epic, the narrators’ changing perspectives and the older leads’ shifting roles result in entirely new looks at multiple characters.
Speaking of new narrators, the brand spanking new annalists are a duo this time for the first in Company history. Arkana and Shukrat, the teen sisters/cousins from the previous new novels, are our new authorial voices, and what a changeup they are. The highborn political captives turned adoptive daughters of the Company keep with the series tradition of having an almost unrecognizable shift in the way the story is told, immediately retcon what they claim is a number of false records from previous annalists, and begin to sow chaos across the Company. Cook, after 25 years, still absolutely has the power to change his writing style on a dime, and the sisters are a perfect window for this new era of Company history.
Along that line, all the meaty atmosphere and character depictions that make the previous books great are also here, but there are also a couple of stumbling blocks worth talking about. First, each of The Black Company books represents a different examination of elements of armies and war–and Lies Weeping is one that explores what happens to an active army in its downtime. This is a story about keeping bored soldiers occupied and the examination of the mental state of killing machines when they are left without a direction to point their swords. A large part of this examination surrounds a look of inactivity and boredom, and while interesting at a macro level, it can also be incredibly slowly paced and sometimes boring in and of itself. Additionally, while I really love the juxtaposition that Arkana and Shukrat bring as annalists compared to their previous iterations, there are a couple of nagging issues with their narration. The clash of teen girl drama with military theater is interesting and hysterical. Still, I think Glen flew too close to the sun with his personification of the girls, and some of the narrative can feel pretty sexist and exhausting. If I have to hear these girls refer to each other by their breasts one more time, I will walk into the sea, which is a shame because I otherwise really enjoyed this book. Here’s hoping Cook finds a better balance in the banter going forward because these girls are a lot of fun.
Lies Weeping is both an unimaginable achievement and a book that I can’t imagine a typical reader enjoying. It is truly magical that after twenty-five years, Cook was able to rekindle the magic of unreliable narrators, unique POV shifts, and anti-war commentary that are the hallmarks of this entire series. At the same time, this is a book about bored soldiers in the downtime between conflicts, and it results in a book that is, in itself, kinda boring. Sure, it has brilliant commentary on what happens when a military-industrial complex isn’t given a clear direction, and on the strangely transformative effects of long-term occupations, and on the legacy that war leaves behind, but it’s also glacially slow and needs some character balancing. Yet, it is also one of the most promising and adventurous starts to a story in 2025, and I am very excited to see where it goes next.
Rating: Lies Weeping – 8.5.10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
