Synopsis:
Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds.
Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters, and the mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.
Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it’s a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.
Review:
This will probably be a different review than many others you’ll read about The Devils, and that’s because…this is my first Joe Abercrombie novel. (gasp!)
I know, I know…I even have a paperback of Best Served Cold on my bookshelf, but I just haven’t gotten around to his work so far. Part of it would probably be the Grimdark genre itself — I’ve kinda distanced myself from it a bit, but I’ve tried to get back into it in recent months. Even then, from what I understand, The Devils is a step away from the darkest parts of Grimdark for Abercrombie. In fact, I may be the target audience for The Devils – a fantasy fan, but perhaps a little bit more mainstream than those that go for his typical fare.
So, you won’t hear any comparisons with his First Law books or any Abercrombie novels here. Can’t compare what you don’t know. I know he’s written some very popular and well-received fantasy novels – I just haven’t gotten to them yet.
But after reading The Devils, I’m a lot more likely to.
I absolutely LOVED this book. Abercrombie takes a base of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and DC’s Suicide Squad and mashes them up with Universal’s Monsters, a healthy dash of an alternate history Europe, and a pinch of the Spanish Inquisition (no one expected that!). For me, this book ticked so many boxes and it’s already neck and neck with Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption and John Wiswell’s Wearing the Lion for the best of 2025.
OK…so what’s this book about? Abercrombie gets into the meat of the story fairly quickly. I remember thinking of the adjective “frenetic” as I was reading the first few chapters. We start with a bang and don’t relent for quite a while. When the first break came for our characters, I kinda had to take stock of my own reading and assess what had happened so far…and it was A LOT.
We get a team. What, or who, is on this crack commando unit? A geriatric vampire, an unkillable warrior, a sometimes invisible elf, a magician who claims to be the third (or second) best Necromancer in Europe, and a werewolf. A couple of humans, including the reader’s eyes and ears, Brother Diaz, a Catholic Priest, are along for the ride to install a long-lost princess to the throne of Troy.
While, I compared The Devils to both Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad, I generally like GOTG more, but there is an element that keeps our antiheroes from straying from their assigned mission, so that’s how I roped the Suicide Squad into my comparisons as well.
Abercrombie certainly had fun rewriting the history of Europe, going all the way back to painting Carthage and Troy as more successful in their IRL doomed military campaigns. As far as the church aspect, Abercrombie chose to totally restructure how the church was composed, starting with a female savior who died for humanity’s sins. In spite of that, he probably correctly predicted that any church that would emerge still would have issues with women in leadership roles.
So many great themes undergird the plot from found family to what humanity really means, what role faith plays in our lives to what that faith even means when trouble finds you.
I find myself still thinking about The Devils weeks after reading it and know I will be anxiously awaiting Abercrombie’s followup for this masterwork. Maybe (definitely!) I’ll even go back and read some more of his before the sequel comes out.
Thank you to Tor Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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