By Glen Cook
Night Shade Books, $14.99, 248 pages
Glen Cook’s Reap the East Wind is the sixth book in the author’s Dread Empire series. The Dread Empire books are dark, gritty fantasy novels that existed before dark and gritty fantasy novels even existed. George R. R. Martin gets much of the credit for creating a fantasy series that is complicated, political and mysterious but Glen Cook seems to have been doing the same thing ten years before Martin’s Game of Thrones. Reap the East Wind is the beginning of the end of the series as all the complicated machinations of the various nations and factions begin to fall apart from the onslaught of ancient magical terrors. Cook does an admirable job of catching the reader up on what’s happened in previous books while still pushing the story forward and it can be said this book is about a war of nations against each other and a magical otherness and be correct. Reap the East Wind is also the story of a mourning mother, who has seen her life and family destroyed by war, desperately looking for hope in a world devoid of it and finding it. Only to realize that hope alone will not save her, her family, or the world.
Reviewed by Jonathon Howard
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