The Devils (The Devils, #1) by Joe Abercrombie Narrator: Steven Pacey
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy, grimdark, historical fantasy, horror
Series: The Devils #1
Pages: 560
Length: 25 hours and 6 minutes
Published by Tor Books on May 6, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
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. 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.
My Review:
The story begins on a saint’s day in one supposedly holy city, and ends on a different saint’s day in a different holy city. Which is just one of MANY ironic twists in the story, as there are absolutely ZERO saints anywhere else in it – and not much in the way of actual holiness in either of those two cities.
Because what this whole entire world needs isn’t saints. Which is a good thing because there don’t seem to be any. Not even on either side of the schism that makes up the not-nearly-as-holy-as-it-claims-to-be church. What this world needs, even if neither church is willing to admit it in public, are devils.
At least, that’s what the church calls them. Because that gives at least the church of the west a reason to lock them up and hold the key very, very close to the ecclesiastical vest until it needs those devils to sow a little chaos among their enemies.
Or take on a mission that the church WANTS to fail. After all, those monsters are the congregation of the clandestine (and unlucky) thirteenth chapel, the Chapel of the Holy Expediency. And monsters – or devils – make a VERY expedient sacrifice when your goal is to save the world.
Even if you plan to damn yourself and everyone else in the process.
The mechanism by which this vast, sprawling, epic fantasy is told is a quest. Or so it seems. But the quest that those devils think they are on isn’t exactly the quest they’ve been told they are on. Well it is, but it isn’t. Because it’s not expedient to tell devils the truth – and why would anyone do that anyway?
Especially since the truth isn’t true on so many levels that it’s lies and deceptions all the way down. It’s all part of one sad and glorious trip to hell that isn’t so much paved with good intentions as it is greased skids towards likely doom.
Which is when the twist in the tail pulls the whole story back up into a future that no one planned to ever see the light.
Escape Rating A: I started this in audiobook, and the audiobook as read by Steven Pacey was excellent. But I got stuck into this one hard, and just couldn’t listen fast enough. So I switched to text. Even reading wasn’t fast enough, but it at least it was FASTER.
This was a WOW of an epic fantasy, and I’m every bit as twisted up by the ending of it as nearly everyone involved in the story turned out to be. Because it was wild and crazy and fascinating every step of the way. Even though I knew everyone was deceiving each other, I didn’t know quite how until the very end, and the thing I thought was the BIG scam turned out not to be. Although there were more littler scams than I had figured out along the way.
I’m also not quite sure this is exactly grimdark. It read more like ‘cynical dark’. Not that the situation is any less dark, but the snarky voices of the protagonists make it feel like a somewhat lighter shade of black than outright grim even though it actually isn’t.
It’s very much as if the Suicide Squad decided to traipse through Westeros to clean up the blood by making it gorier – but with more attitude along the way. Something like that.
But this is definitely a ‘squad’ of some kind – even if a reluctantly gathered one. Which makes it difficult to decide exactly whose story this is. We follow all the characters in turn and turn about so we don’t get a LOT of depth on anyone in particular but we do watch the group coalesce into a surprised but reluctant whole as they keep surviving by pulling each other’s asses out of increasing hot fires.
Very much on the other hand, the lack of a single central character feels intentional, as this is the first book in a series featuring the group of devils and not the people they actually manage to save – because they can’t save themselves and that’s kind of the point.
As much as I loved this one, and I did, I have mixed feelings about some of the specifics. Specifically the alternate history and the lack of a central character. Let me explain…
The history is very much based on actual history at the point where the Catholic Church was split between Rome and Byzantium. However, the point of the split in this book seems to be that Carthage either fell later to the Romans or sent out more – and more highly ranked – refugees when it fell. Or something like that as we don’t get as much detail as I would have liked. (My constant lament.) There’s also quite a bit of magic treated rather scientifically just to add to the fun. And the body count.
The one detail we do get that I have mixed feelings about on multiple levels is the way that Elves are substituted for the Saracens in our own history. That’s either going to work really well or come off very badly but we don’t have enough evidence to know which. At least not yet.
The result of these twists in history is that things feel almost familiar and yet not at the same time. It feels like an uncanny valley, in that it’s almost right and then goes a bit sideways and I’m knocked off the pins of my familiarity. (It reminded me a bit of Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History as that alternate history fantasy world also involved Carthage.)
At the same time, the church schism in The Devils had a lot of elements of the Chantry schism in Dragon Age, in that in this fantasy world, the savior was a woman, and all the church officials and hierarchy in the east are women including the Pope, while the church of the west is headed by a Patriarch and men run everything. With magic being elevated in the west and decried in the east, which is where the monsters of the Chapel of Holy Expediency come into the picture. (Dragon Age made this split north vs. south but it is the same split, including the way that magic and its practitioners are treated.)
Because there is no central character – instead a large cast of them – I’m not quite sure this stuck the dismount. The ending feels like it isn’t. An ending, I mean. More like this particular adventure came to something that seems like an end – or at least a pause in hostilities – and that there is more to come. Which is likely intentional as this is the start of a series. Whose title and publication date are TBD and ARRGGGHHH.
A couple of final thoughts before I close this and try to get over the book hangover it’s left me with. One is that this is LONG. It sucks the reader in pretty quickly, and goes trippingly by once you’re in it, but reading this in small sips doesn’t work AT ALL. These people are out of the frying pan and into the fire so often and so quickly that you’re pretty much always thinking, “just one more page, just one more chapter, just until they get out of THIS fix” until you become conscious at the end that you’ve been sitting for hours in the same position and the cat still doesn’t want you to move – or however that works in your house.
Second, this does leave the reader with a big book hangover. If you’re looking for something to tide you over until we at least know when the next one’s coming, I’d recommend taking a look at Brian McClellan’s In the Shadow of Lightning and Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker for the snarkastic voice, The Moonsteel Crown by Stephen Deas for the gang of cutthroats, Mary Gentle’s Ash and/or pretty much anything by Guy Gavriel Kay for the slightly alternate fantasy history, and especially The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman for the misled and misleading gang of ne’er do wells on a mission they’ve been deceived into that takes them on a walk through different, but equally dark places on its and their way. With the same kind of heartbreak at the end.
