The Devils — The Devils #1

The Devils Review

For nearly two decades, Joe Abercrombie has been the reigning craftsman of grimdark fantasy, building and rebuilding the First Law world into one of the genre’s most morally bruising landscapes. The Devils, published in May 2025, is the first book of an entirely new series, and the most striking thing about it is how much fun it is willing to have. This is Abercrombie unbound from his own mythology, writing a rollicking, fast-moving adventure that feels less like a dirge for human nature and more like a heist movie with fangs. It is also, quite deliberately, the easiest door he has ever built into his fiction.

The premise is a gift to anyone who loves a ragtag-team story. The Chapel of the Holy Expediency — a deliciously bureaucratic name for an institution that does the Church’s dirtiest work — keeps a stable of monsters on retainer. There is a vampire, a werewolf, a necromancer, an immortal knight who has seen too many centuries, and an elf, among other assorted horrors. These are not heroes. They are weapons, leashed and aimed at problems too unsavoury for anyone respectable to touch.

The Mission and the Monk

Into this den of devils walks Brother Diaz, an idealistic young monk who has been handed a posting he neither wanted nor is remotely equipped for: he is to wrangle the misfits and keep them pointed in the right direction. Their job is to escort Alex, a foul-mouthed, light-fingered thief with no interest in being anyone’s chosen one, across a dangerous alt-medieval Europe analogue. The catch, revealed early, is that Alex is the rightful heir to a throne, and the quest is to deliver her to it and crown her before her enemies catch up.

It is a setup with obvious cinematic DNA — the Dirty Dozen, the Suicide Squad, every story in which irredeemable specialists are bolted together for one impossible job. Abercrombie knows exactly what he is doing with that lineage and leans into it with evident glee. The pleasure of the book is watching these monstrous individualists fail to cooperate, then grudgingly cooperate, then form the kind of battered loyalty that only people who have repeatedly saved one another’s lives can manage.

A Lighter Register

What separates The Devils from the First Law novels is tone. Where Best Served Cold and The Heroes used dark humour as a release valve on genuine bleakness, The Devils inverts the ratio. The humour is foregrounded, the pace is brisker, and the overall register is adventurous rather than tragic. Brother Diaz’s earnest decency rubbing against the cynicism of his charges generates a steady stream of comedy, and the banter between the misfits is some of the most purely entertaining dialogue Abercrombie has written.

This is not to say the book is weightless. Abercrombie cannot help complicating his characters, and even at its most caper-like the novel keeps asking who deserves loyalty, what redemption costs, and whether a monster who chooses restraint is still a monster. But readers arriving from his earlier work should know that the moral gut-punch is softer here by design. That is a feature for some readers and a slight loss for others; those who prized the unflinching darkness of the First Law books may find this a touch breezier than they would like.

The Perfect Entry Point

The most consequential fact about The Devils is that it requires nothing of the reader. There is no trilogy to absorb first, no tangle of returning characters, no decades of accumulated history. It stands entirely on its own, which makes it the single best place for a curious newcomer to discover what all the fuss about Joe Abercrombie has been about. For years, the honest answer to “where should I start?” has been “the First Law trilogy, and clear your schedule.” Now there is an alternative: a self-contained, welcoming, propulsive adventure that delivers his voice, his wit and his knack for ensemble dynamics in a far more approachable package.

That accessibility comes with the usual costs of a series opener. The cast is large, and a few of the misfits inevitably receive less development than the standouts, who threaten to crowd them out. And because this is book one of a planned series, the novel spends real estate planting seeds for what comes next rather than tying every thread, so the ending opens doors as much as it closes them.

Where It Sits in His Career

Placed against the whole arc of Abercrombie’s bibliography, The Devils reads like an author confident enough to loosen his grip and simply entertain. After spending years deconstructing fantasy heroism, he has written something that frankly enjoys the tropes it plays with. The result is the rare book that will satisfy his veteran fans looking for something fresh and simultaneously serve as an ideal introduction for everyone else. It is a confident, charismatic launch for a new series, and it makes the prospect of a sequel genuinely exciting.

If you have always meant to try Joe Abercrombie and never known where to begin, begin here. If you already love him, you will find a familiar voice having more fun than it has in years.

The Ensemble in Detail

The success of any team-of-misfits story rests on chemistry, and The Devils spends its considerable page count earning that chemistry one collision at a time. The vampire, the werewolf, the necromancer, the immortal knight and the elf are not merely a checklist of monster-movie archetypes; Abercrombie gives each of them a wound, a grievance, or a buried decency that surfaces at inconvenient moments. The immortal knight in particular carries the weariness of someone who has outlived every reason he ever had for fighting, and the necromancer’s relationship with death is treated as a source of both grim comedy and unexpected pathos.

The dynamic between Brother Diaz and Alex anchors all of this. Diaz arrives convinced the world can be improved through faith and good intentions; Alex has survived precisely by assuming the opposite. Their reluctant, abrasive, slowly warming relationship is the spine the caper hangs on, and Abercrombie plays the contrast for laughs without letting either character collapse into caricature. Alex’s foul mouth and allergy to her own destiny make her a thoroughly modern reluctant heir, and the gradual reveal of what the crown actually means to her gives the back half of the book real stakes.

A Confident New Direction

There is also something quietly significant about an author this established choosing to start over. Rather than mining the First Law world indefinitely, Abercrombie has built a fresh setting — an alt-medieval Europe analogue with its own geography, politics, and theology — and trusted readers to follow him somewhere new. The world-building is sketched with a light hand, delivered through action and banter rather than dense exposition, which keeps the pace brisk and the tone adventurous. It is the work of a writer who knows exactly which details matter and which can be left to the imagination, and that economy is a large part of why the book reads so quickly despite its length.

The road-trip structure helps, too. By keeping the company moving across hostile territory toward a single goal, Abercrombie gives himself a steady supply of fresh dangers, new locations, and opportunities for the misfits to demonstrate their respective horrors. The momentum rarely flags, and the set pieces are inventive enough to keep the formula from feeling mechanical.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A fast, funny, monster-stuffed caper that doubles as the most welcoming Abercrombie starting point yet.