‘The Devils' Review: Joe Abercrombie's Gothic Suicide Squad Doesn't Quite Work

Forbes

17-05-2025

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Review)
Vampires, werewolves and necromancers, oh my! Joe Abercrombie's new fantasy novel The Devils has all the hallmarks of the fantasy author's past books – bloody action, wry humor, rich world-building and a breathless pace – while delving into entirely new territory. And yet, despite all that, this is a rare misfire from one of my favorite fantasy authors.
The world of The Devils is a mirror of our own, an alt-universe where the Catholic Church has all female priests, a female (child) pope and a plethora of magical creatures, including dark and mysterious elves to the East, which humankind has been at war with for generations. In this fiction, the Crusades were not waged against Moors, but against elves – a race said to devour the flesh of humans, among other atrocities that are neither confirmed nor denied by the end of the story. This, we must assume, is being saved for the rest of the trilogy.
There is still a Schism between the Western and Eastern churches, though the Eastern church is headquartered not in Constantinople, but rather a reimagined Troy. There are lots of little touches like this throughout the novel, making the world of The Devils at once familiar and utterly distinct from our own.
The Europe of Abercrombie's story is in upheaval. The mad sorceress Eudoxia, Empress of Troy, has died, leaving the Serpent Throne empty. Her five sons have scattered across the land, vying for power. But the Western Church has a plan. They have discovered the long-lost heir of the Eastern Empire, a young waif named Alex who grew up in the streets as an urchin and thief. The young Pope Bendicta the First and her advisors hand Alex over to the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, a special operations outfit that handles the dirtiest church business with the help of a few monsters. Their task: Bring Alex to Troy and seat her on the throne. Naturally, it's neither that easy or that straightforward in the end.
We meet young Brother Diaz, a country bumpkin monk who has come to the Holy City with big ambitions, only to find himself the nominal head of the Chapel, both his nerve and his faith put to the test as he's plunged in way over his head. Diaz is accompanied by an immortal knight, a resourceful swashbuckler, an elderly vampire, a horny werewolf and an elf who can turn invisible (using a power that reminded me of Doli from The Prydain Chronicles). There's a solid balance of male and female representation here, and it's clear that Abercrombie made a concerted effort at this, though I believe his First Law books have lots of great female characters as well. Still, this is a much more female-driven story, with lots more sex, queer representation and so forth.
This is Abercrombie's Suicide Squad, essentially. Jakob of Thorn and Baptiste work for the church of their own accord, handlers for the rest of the titular Devils. The rest are conscripts – sentenced to work for the Chapel of the Holy Expediency for their various crimes. Baron Rikard is a geriatric vampire whose most frightening power is his magical voice and ability to persuade even large crowds to do whatever he wants. The more he feeds on humans, the younger he becomes; the more he expends his powers, the older. He has other more traditional vampiric powers, but it is his oratory that makes him dangerous.
The necromancer Balthazar is a powerful animator of the dead, but his arrogance renders him blind to many truths. His many attempts to free himself from the holy seal placed upon the Devils becomes a running gag involving various unpleasant bodily functions. Sunny the elf is perhaps the most out-of-place in the bunch, both because she's the lone elf in a realm of humans, and because she's so selfless and kind. She and Alex strike up a romance somewhere along the way. Vigga the Swedish werewolf is, in some ways, the female version of Logen Ninefingers, if the barbarian had been much less lucid and far, far more obsessed with rutting at every possible opportunity.
This band of ne'erdowells is sent by Pope Benedicta and Alex's uncle to bring her to Troy and seat her on the Serpent Throne. Naturally, of course, things go sideways. They are set upon by one of Eudoxia's five sons and his warband of mutant creatures – half-man, half-animal abominations created by the former Empress as part of her many diabolical experiments. Overcoming the first son, the group continues their journey only to face down one after another, each with his own gimmick: The pirate son with his sea-creature half-men minions, for instance; a band of hunters with their own, even deadlier werewolf. Four, in total, attempt to assassinate their niece and her oddball wards. There's a fifth, but we won't spoil his roll in the story.
Toward the end, the novel takes on some more traditionally Abercrombian twists and turns as hard truths are revealed and new threats emerge. There's lots of terrific action, some fun side characters, and plenty of surprises along the way. The chapters rotate between a handful of the characters in POV chapters: Alex, Brother Diaz, Jakob of Thorn, Sunny, Balthazar and even Vigga become the narrators of this tale. Only Balthazar and Baptiste are left out.
The Devils is a fun read, but it struggles in three ways.
First, the plot is too straightforward and repetitive for the vast bulk of the read. The journey from the Holy City to Troy and the various encounters with Eudoxia's sons along the way quickly starts to feel stale. While each of these is entertaining enough, it becomes predictable in a hurry. Our heroes face dire odds time and again, but invariably their various superpowers (resurrection, invisibility, summoning the dead, etc.) excise them from each pickle, a little worse for wear but mostly intact. There's no urgency, no real stakes. When you start to realize this, the tension evaporates. It starts to feel a bit like a game of Dungeons & Dragons, with repetitive player encounters designed to bang up the party but not kill anyone off too soon – though it rallies considerably in its final act, even if it never quite reaches the glorious level of politicking and betrayal we find in The First Law.
Then there is the humor. I have always loved Abercrombie's ability to infuse his fiction with comic relief. It's often subtle, a dry gallows humor that crops up just enough to keep things prickly without falling too far into camp. The Devils barrels headlong into campy, often overbearing jokiness, with too many catchphrases and one-liners repeated too often that never quite land the way Logen's do in The First Law, or Glokta's for that matter. I found myself preferring Baron Rikard to the other Devils, simply because we didn't spend as much time in his head. It feels wildly more juvenile than Abercrombie's other books, almost as if it's being written with an entirely different audience in mind rather than serious readers of genre fiction. Ironically, the constant attempts at humor here make it much less funny than his previous books. I hate to call anything cringe-inducing, but alas, much of The Devils is just that. Which is a shame, because much of it is also quite well-written and engaging.
These two issues bring us to our third. While I genuinely like the characters, and while each certainly has his or her distinct flare, they're universally underdeveloped. Sure, Balthazar is arrogant and full of himself and Jakob has a dark past and Vigga is horny and can't control her wolf persona, but I never feel as connected to any of these people as I was to Logen Ninefingers or the Dogman or Sand dan Glokta or Jezal dan Luthar or countless other characters from The First Law books. The Devils never slows down enough to really give us the opportunity to connect, and the humor starts to make a lot of the characters feel a bit one-note or boxed-in. They are caricatures, almost, or the bare bones of characters who never really blossom into anything beyond their stat blocks and super powers. Many felt weirdly derivative of characters from Abercrombie's earlier works.
None of this is to say that The Devils is a bad fantasy novel. It's a fun page-turner at times and Abercrombie gets as much right as he gets wrong. But The First Law's nine-book arc is a tough act to follow. And while this plays to some of his authorial strengths, it just as often leaves us thinking about how much better Abercrombie has been in the past. The prose veers between delightful and sloppy, the dialogue between sharp and repetitive, and Abercrombie continues to give us some of the most imaginative battles and descriptive language in the genre . . . before swerving into pithy observations and weird asides that make the writing feel oddly puerile. The entire thing is at once undercooked and trying too hard: at quippy humor, at crass edginess, at shock value. It's all far more tiresome than a swashbuckling adventure story like this ought to be.
Beyond all of this, something is missing here. I think it's a reason to really care about these characters and their fates in the first place, or the broader fate of the world they inhabit. Hopefully the next books in the series can convince me otherwise.