In January 2026, a group of Hugh Cook fans began republishing his 10 book series, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.

This is noteworthy since these novels were basically out of print and weren't available in e-book or audio. Untangling them from copyright limbo was no small feat.

In August, these fans, operating as Zenphos Press, published the first audio edition of The Wizards and the Warriors. The first novel in the series.

I was lucky enough to snag an early copy via the r/hughcook sub.

The narrator, Morgan Scott, is also a fan, and does an excellent job, you can feel that this is a labor of love for him.

Originally published from the mid 1980s to the early 90s, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness stands out as a critique of the heroic fantasy tropes so common in that era.

While other novels in the series use humor as part of this deconstruction, The Wizards and the Warriors is deadly serious. It is not Pratchett's The Color of Magic. It is more like Saving Private Rian. Working within the format of a heroic tale, exposing its dirty underbelly.

Cook takes the wizards and the warriors, two major examples of toxic masculinity and exposes the folly in their quest for power.

I originally learned of Cook's novels in the early 2010s. As a blind person I had to use a synthetic voice to listen to them.

Cook had a website on the early internet where he published the full text of, The Wordsmiths and the Warguild, the second book of the Chronicles. After reading that I had to resort to bootleg e-book versions scanned and uploaded by fans.

I'm very glad this series is finally getting a proper audiobook edition.

This is my original 2013 review:

Hugh Cook inserts some reality into his Fantasy.

While the setting is fantastic, Cook makes sure to break our expectations of a regular fantasy adventure, with his less than heroic heroes and less than clear path to ultimate goal.

My favorite scene is a battle where we first hear about the general's well laid plans and then watch them crumble in the face of reality.
So many books place a brilliant commander in charge and then you watch his brilliant plan unfold like clockwork. Hugh Cook is way beyond that kind of fantasy.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/95351200-2bf6-40d0-86ee-83dbe316e541

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