I’d read, and loved, a lot of fantasy novels before I made my way to Cook, and I applied many of the life lessons learned therein to my own life. (Not to mention my body: I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my left arm and the war cry of the Golden Company on my right.) Cook’s revisionist tendencies are of course influential to and present in the work of George R.R Martin, while I see a lot of Robert E. Howard’s earthy affect in Cook in turn. (Superhuman martial and coital prowess notwithstanding, Conan is nothing if not the original just-some-guy fantasy protagonist.)

But until I encountered Croaker and Company, I had never imagined that my own experience working for wizards, or for any of my other shitty bosses, could be captured in fantasy fiction.

The Taken, with their outsized personalities, unforgettable idiosyncrasies, and total lack of scruples? They’re Upstairs: the people who run the show, oblivious to the lives of those beneath them when they aren’t busy trying to make those lives worse. They all work together when they have to and do a terrifyingly good job of it, too, as awful people in our own world so often do. But when that need passes, they’re at each other’s throats, as awful people in our own world so often are. And no matter what, we’re forced to go along with their lunacy to earn a living, if not stay alive.

For my Blood Knife debut I went long on how Glen Cook’s Chronicles of the Black Company reflect the universal human experience of working for horrible bosses. (If you’ve ever been curious about my time at Wizard, this one’s for you.)