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Joe Abercrombie’s first novel outside the First Law universe since 2015 is loud, brutal, and genuinely fun. But is it going to scratch your Abercrombie itch?
I read The Devils in January, several months after it made the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller lists. As someone who writes grimdark fantasy, and who considers The Blade Itself one of the defining books of the genre, it’s safe to say I’m an Abercrombie fan. So my expectations for The Devils were high. And, if i were to sum up my verdict in a sentence, the novel didn’t quite meet thos expectations.
Below I go into a bit more detail as to why.
What Is The Devils About?
The Devils takes place in an alternate medieval Europe. Recognisable enough to feel grounded, warped just enough to feel genuinely fresh. In this version of history, the Trojans won the Iliad. Carthage replaced Rome. The continent now lives under a Christianity-adjacent Church whose holy saviour was a woman, and whose upper hierarchy is largely female. It’s thinly veiled religious satire, worn proudly on its sleeve.
The story is a quest. Brother Diaz, a naïve and slightly hapless monk, is summoned to the Sacred City expecting a prestigious posting. Instead he’s given command of the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, the Church’s secret task force of expendable monsters, and handed a mission: escort Alex, a common thief who turns out to be the secret heir to the throne of Troy, across a war-torn continent and install her as empress.
Standing in the way are Eudoxia’s four scheming sons, a looming invasion of flesh-eating elves, and the small matter of keeping the devils themselves from killing each other.
The Devils Themselves
This is where Abercrombie is at his best, and it’s the main reason the book works.
The ensemble is deliberately monstrous, not morally grey in the First Law sense, but genuinely awful, often farcically so. The cast is:
- Jakob of Thorn — a cursed knight who cannot die no matter what is done to him. And a great deal is done to him.
- Baron Rikard — a vampire with an inexplicable love of dumplings.
- Vigga Ullasdottr — a Norse werewolf who treats casual slaughter as something between a hobby and a stress response.
- Balthazar — a necromancer of towering ego and genuine depth. Probably the best-developed character in the book (which is why the ending fell a bit flat for me, but we’ll get to that later).
- Sunny — an elf who just wants to be seen, but who’s poweris to literally turn invisible.
- Baptiste — a roguish woman of many previous professions, who gets somewhat less page time than she deserves.
Leading them, reluctantly and badly, is Brother Diaz. The straight man in a circus that never stops.
What Abercrombie does brilliantly is make you understand these characters without softening them. By the time the found-family dynamics click into place in the book’s second half, the bonds feel earned.
Balthazar in particular gets a great arc with his stubborn vanity breaking down into something close to humanity. The relationship between Sunny and Alex, two outcasts finding each other in the chaos, carries real feeling.
This assembly of rogues, misfits, criminals, is Suicide Squad premise done I think quite well. The point isn’t that these monsters have hearts of gold. The point is that they have hearts at all, and that surprises them as much as it does you.
What Works
The worldbuilding, an alternate history where elves are cannibals and a (probably) real existential threat. Though the parallels drawn to the Ottomon empire didn’t go unnoticed. Here magic is stranger and more abundant than the First Law ever allowed which creates room for Abercrombie to do things he simply couldn’t in that world.
The action, when it lands, is as kinetic and as visceral as anything he’s written. And the humour is broader and more slapstick than his earlier work. This is the most consistently funny Abercrombie novel, absurdism deployed against a backdrop of brutality.
The satirical commentary on organised religion is also sharp. The Church is hypocritical, self-serving, and perfectly willing to do exactly the things it condemns.
Where It Loses Me
I love action. Sword fights, magic fights, gunfights, fistfights. But this book was too much even for me. It was exhausting.
The Devils is structured as a series of escalating set-pieces. The group gets ambushed, survives, gets ambushed again, survives again, reaches Troy, and then the book continues for roughly another twenty percent of its length after what I thought was the final resolution.
The final final act piles further carnage on top of a climax that already felt complete: more necromancy, mutant magical experiments, battles between bad and considerably worse. And when the ending does finally arrive it’s characteristically Abercrombie. Nobody learned anything, everyone is worse off in some way, and the grinding disillusionment settles over you like a familiar damp coat - which when everyone has fought so hard and when you’ve had to endure for so many action sequences, well it was disappointing.
In the First Law trilogy, that nihilism earned its weight. There was momentum, consequence, the slow accumulation of tension before release.
The Devils doesn’t give itself that space. Characters lurch from frying pan to fire and back, repeatedly, without any room to breathe. When action is relentless, tension becomes noise. You stop fearing for the characters as the loud, brutal, storyline careens forward.
It’s a structural issue. There’s no rising tensions just more action. And then the book has what feels like a natural ending, but keeps going. That post-climax sequence is well-written in isolation, but it arrives at a point when you’ve already worn-out as a reader. And the Abercrombie ending — true to form — delivers its disillusionment without quite the buildup that made the same trick land so hard in Last Argument of Kings.
None of this is a unique reading. Other reviewers when I went off to Reddit to try and understand why the book just didn’t do it for me, noted the same pattern. The plot is episodic in a way that makes the middle section feel like it’s marking time between fights rather than building to something.
How It Compares to The First Law
If you’re coming to The Devils as a First Law reader, manage your expectations.
The Blade Itself built a world with patience, took its time with Logen and Glokta and Jezal, and made you care about people it was about to break. The Devils announces its intentions on the first page and keeps them. In some ways it’s actually a better entry point for a new reader, the alternate world requires no prior knowledge, the tone is more accessible, and the characters are considerably easier to like than Glokta on first impression.
For those of us who know what Abercrombie can do at the top of his game, it sits a tier below his best. Which still makes it excellent, just not the book that fully justifies some of the hyperbole it received on release.
If you’re wondering where to start with Abercrombie, our full Joe Abercrombie books in order guide has you covered. And if you want the broader picture of the genre, we’ve also covered the best grimdark fantasy books worth your time.
Is The Devils Worth Reading?
Yes. Comfortably. I enjoyed it.
The characters are some of the most entertaining Abercrombie has assembled. The world is original and full of unexplored corners. The humour works more often than not, the action is punishing and well-executed, and the found-family dynamics hit harder than a book this chaotic has any right to deliver.
But, it is too long, too relentless, and structurally uneven in its final act. The ending, when it comes, doesn’t quite justify the effort required to reach it.
That said, Abercrombie does something interesting with the premise ‘the only way to fight evil is with evil’, and the best moments here are as good as anything he’s written.
3.5 out of 5 stars. A loud, brutal, enjoyable book. Not his best work, but worth your time.
Quick Guide
Read it if: You’ve enjoyed any of the First Law books, you liked Kings of the Wyld, or you want a grimdark ensemble that’s more fun than punishment.
Skip it if: You bounced off the First Law this won’t convert you. Or if you need tight plotting and rising tension; this book doesn’t offer either.
Start here or First Law first? First Law first, ideally. But The Devils works as a standalone. It’s set in a completely separate world with no required reading.
Audiobook? Steven Pacey reads it, the same narrator who read the entire First Law series. If you’ve listened to those, you’ll be in safe hands.
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