The Black Company

The pacing and vocabulary are all over the place.

Fantasy often relies overly much on long, drawn-out descriptions. This seems to flit from moment to moment without letting anything sink in, then dawdles with useless dialogue that reveal character far less than the ham-fisted descriptions of the characters.

The book uses the word “yon” one page, then has a character saying “yeah” several pages later. It's jarring.

Cook seems to have trawled a thesaurus looking for ways to spice things up. It mostly just draws attention to his clunky transitions from description to dialogue.

This reads like a parody of the genre.