The new George RR Martin? How Joe Abercrombie became the dark lord of fantasy

Telegraph

04-06-2025

James Cameron fans are blue in the face begging the director of Terminator and Aliens to do something other than churn out new Avatar films – as he has been doing remorselessly since 2008. It appears they may at last have their wish. While he is to revisit Avatar's world of elongated Smurf-like aliens with – groan – a further three sequels, Cameron has also announced he is scripting an adaptation of The Devils by Lancaster fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie. To quote another fantasy author, the road goes ever on and on – but in the case of Cameron, it has finally veered in a more interesting direction.
Cameron's swerve into epic fantasy is a thrilling development and, not only because it potentially means less Avatar in our lives. Described only half-jokingly by its author as 'medieval Suicide Squad ', Abercrombie's The Devils is set in a semi-fantastical medieval Europe in which a 10-year-old girl is Pope, and an Elven army is about to invade.
Our hero, Brother Diaz, is a man of the cloth who must work with a group of monsters – among them a vampire, a werewolf and a necromancer – to save humanity. As Abercrombie says, Suicide Squad is a reference, but the book could also be thought of as Game of Thrones meets The A-Team or The Dirty Dozen as scripted by a blood-thirsty JRR Tolkien.
A Devils movie scripted by an figure of the calibre of James Cameron would be a crowning achievement for Abercrombie, who, since publishing his first novel in 2006, has quietly become a leading voice in British speculative writing. Not that he needs Hollywood's blessing: The Devils topped this year's bestseller list and was also a success in the United States, where it reached number five in the New York Times hard-cover bestseller charts – adding to the estimated five million books he has already shifted.
Want to hear more about @LordGrimdark 's upcoming fantasy sensation #TheDevils?
Who better to tell you than the man himself?
Shop now: https://t.co/3jSkWcON0O pic.twitter.com/oyfepJ7993
— Gollancz (@gollancz) March 31, 2025
Those are blockbusting figures for an author operating in the relatively stodgy field of epic fantasy – which has lately been eclipsed by more voguish genres such as ' Romantasy ' (think Mother of Dragons meet Mills & Boon) and authors such as Sarah J Maas (who has sold 40 million books and counting).
'His writing has a charisma to it. There's a cynical wit and a bit of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness. So many of his characters have colourful and iconic internal monologues that lend some levity to whatever horrible atrocity is currently taking place,' says Hiu Gregg, the fantasy blogger behind the website The Fantasy Inn, who says that a Devils movie would need to be in the roguish, semi-jokey vein of films such as James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy.
'That's where I think the challenge will be in adapting something like The Devils. You need the casting to be spot-on. You need to take the text only as seriously as it takes itself. You can't play it 100 per cent straight, or it will flop. The three-word pitch for this book is 'Papal Suicide Squad', but if James Cameron is going make this movie, he needs to understand that we're talking the James Gunn version.'
Abercrombie is often compared to George RR Martin and, speaking to the Telegraph in 2022, revealed that reading Martin's A Game Of Thrones in his early 20s had a huge impact. Both he and Martin had grown up on Tolkien's vision of fantastical worlds defined by a battle between good and evil. Martin turned the concept on its head by suggesting true evil was not a dark lord in a shadowy tower – but a rival noble prepared to shiv you in the back if it meant advancing their own position.
'I found expressed in that book, what I felt had been missing in epic fantasy,' said Abercrombie. 'It had that scale and depth [familiar from Tolkien], but it also had the sort of arresting, surprising characters. It had shocks, the surprises: the good guys don't always win. And suddenly everything felt dangerous and unpredictable. It was the kind of things that I'd seen in other genres. But I've never seen it applied to classic epic fantasy in that way. And it really made me think, 'Wow, you can do something shocking and exciting and character-focused within epic fantasy'.'
He put those ideas into practice with his first novel, The Blade Itself. Written while he was working as a freelance film editor, the book was rejected by multiple publishers and agents. But then a friend happened to be on a course with a woman who worked for fantasy publisher Gollancz: she agreed to throw an eye over the novel, and a few weeks later, Abercrombie had his first book deal.
The Blade Itself didn't set the world alight in 2006, but the story of a down-on-his-luck barbarian named Logen Ninefingers and a former torturer named Inquisitor Glokta earned a following over the following years. It had arrived at the perfect time: with the success of George RR Martin and other authors such as Robin Hobb, gritty, violent storytelling had become the hot new trend in fantasy – a milieu that came to be known as 'grimdark'.
'Grimdark' was initially used as an insult – but Abercrombie jokingly embraced the term by taking the Twitter handle 'Lord Grimdark'. 'At that time, when people use the word grimdark, they were taking the piss,' he would explain. 'They were saying something was bad. They were using it in as a pejorative: risible, ridiculous, over the top, too much violence, too much cynicism, too much nihilism. I was taking the piss out of myself.'
Beyond the humour, he will have known that his writing had too much flair and inventiveness to be corralled into any one genre.
'A large part of Abercrombie's success is that his books are not just grimdark. He was of course a huge part of the mid-noughties to mid-tens peak of grimdark fantasy popularity, but he broke a lot of rules within that sub-genre,' says the Fantasy Inn's Hiu Gregg. 'He dared to be funny. He could make a character death or a betrayal feel like a punchline. Rather than extinguishing hope completely, he understood how to use it for dramatic or comedic contrast. And for me, that gives his books a longevity beyond being just another set of grimdark stories.'
Did my biggest US event yet with ⁦ @BrandSanderson ⁩ in Salt Lake City last night. 450 people including a gate crashing ⁦ @Pierce_Brown ⁩. On to Seattle with ⁦ @robinhobb ⁩ tonight… pic.twitter.com/FODYQBGQl8
— Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) May 21, 2025
Abercrombie's work also wrestles with big ideas – but in a way that feels organic rather than preachy. For instance, his Age of Madness trilogy – which began with A Little Hatred in 2019 – is set in a fantasy world in the midst of an Industrial Revolution. It has wizards and warriors, but also explores the tension between capitalism and workers, between those who want to defend the status quo and those eager to burn it to the ground. It is Middle-earth meets Les Misérables.
'I try to stay in characters' heads. It's the story of those people. And so you don't want to make it 'message-y', if you can avoid it,' he said in 2022. 'You don't want it to be too on the nose. At the same time, you're living in the modern era, and you're writing for an audience of people who are living in the modern age. So everyone brings their current day to the reading of it and you can't avoid what's going on in the world around you while you're writing it. And nor would you want to. Part of the fun of fantasy, as opposed to historical fiction, is that it is really about now. People in fantasy don't tend to be people with a medieval mindset. Generally, they're quite modern in their thinking and their talk and so on – that allows you to hold up a glass darkly if you like, and investigate some things that might feel a little bit much in a modern setting.'
The big difference between Abercrombie and George RR Martin is obviously that Abercrombie has finished what he started. In the 14 years since Martin's most recent Game of Thrones novel, A Dance with Dragons, the Englishman has published six novels and two short-story collections. Martin says it will take another two books to conclude his A Song of Ice and Fire saga, but at age 76, there are question marks about those volumes ever seeing the light of day.
There is precedent in fantasy for authors leaving audiences hanging on. When Martin's friend Robert Jordan died with his Wheel of Time series unfinished, author Brandon Sanderson completed the tale working from Jordan's notes. It has been suggested Abercrombie would be the perfect writer to do likewise with A Song of Ice and Fire. But while he admires what Sanderson did with Wheel of Time, he has always poured cold water on the idea that he might carry on Martin's work for him.
'It's flattering in the sense that it's a series I really love,' he said in 2022. 'It's [also] weird and macabre. It's so personal, writing a book. The thing that makes a book great is that authorial voice that cannot be imitated, that no one else has. The task of trying to imitate that would be both extremely difficult. Probably quite frustrating. And maybe in the end a bit disappointing because you'd never quite do it. And you'd be suppressing your own voice a little bit in order to get there.'
So no Game of Thrones sequels from Abercrombie. Instead, he is working on the next book in the Devils series. Which can only be good news for fans of beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy.
Five essential Joe Abercrombie novels
1. The Heroes, 2011
A gritty tale of courage, betrayal and redemption taking place against the background of a three-day battle between the 'civilized' Union from the South and the wild and lawless warriors of the North and centred on a group of ancient standing stones referred to as 'The Heroes'. Set in the same universe as the author's First Law trilogy, Abercrombie's ability to conjure action and violence without tipping into sadism is on full display while characters such as noble barbarian warrior Curnden Craw are fully realized and brimming with human flaws.
2. The Devils, 2025
It's Medieval Europe as we've never seen it before. The Church consists of female clergy, headed by a 10 year old Pope, while in the lands beyond, hordes of cruel elves are massing and planning an invasion. The only way to save civilization is for a rag bag crew of freaks and outlaws – led by mild-mannered Brother Diaz – to travel to the equivalent of ancient Troy to return a princess to her throne. The Middle Ages filtered through Abercrombie's Quentin Tarantino-does-fantasy sensibility, The Devils is a pure thrill ride. No wonder James Cameron is so keen on it.
3. The Blade Itself, 2006
Abercrombie's debut combined Games of Thrones grimdark sensibility with a very British sense of humour that owed a little to Terry Pratchett and a lot to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was fantasy – with all the po-facedness stripped away.
4. A Little Hatred, 2019
Fantasy novels can often feel trapped in an eternal stasis: why after thousands of years has nobody in Middle-earth or Westeros invented the flintlock pistol, for instance? Abercrombie however pushes onwards with A Little Hatred, a thrilling novel of intrigue and backstabbing set in a fantasy universe experiencing the first aftershocks of an Industrial Revolution.
5. Red Country, 2012
Doing for fantasy what Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven did for the Western, Red Country is the third standalone novel set in the author's First Law world (as debuted in The Blade Itself). It introduces Shy South, a former brigand who sets out to find her missing brother and sister.