PRODUCER NIK VS. THE DEVILS

It sounds like the setup to a joke. A monk, a vampire, a necromancer, and a werewolf walk into the Pope’s chamber. But while Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils has plenty of humor to it, Nikolas discovered that the story is no joke.

Holy work sometimes requires unholy deeds.

Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Holy 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.

Title: The Devils

Author: Joe Abercrombie

Genre: Historical Fiction / Fantasy

Pages: 560

Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook / Audiobook

Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils is a challenging book to sum up in the space of a few hundred words, but I’ve found that it can be summed up rather concisely in a single sentence. This novel is what you would get if a novelization of Creature Commandos had taken place in the Middle Ages, with Douglas Adams as the author. You can substitute the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or Suicide Squad in place of Creature Commandos, but you get the gist of it. If that doesn’t immediately sell you on diving into this novel, I honestly don’t know if I can take you seriously anymore.

Of course, this is not the Middle Ages we know from our real-world history. As would be likely with Adams, Abercrombie has fashioned a whole new history leading up to that point in time. Needless to say, magic is real in the world of his novel, as are supernatural creatures of many kinds. Most notable among the liberties taken with history, perhaps, is the personification of God’s sacrificial child as a woman instead of the Jesus we’re—presumably—familiar with. Naturally, this means the church has been largely dominated by female clergy. There’s some dissatisfaction with that fact, leading to a schism. Even in fiction, religious folks just can’t seem to see eye-to-eye on the things they believe in common.

It should also be noted that elves have replaced Muslims as the soulless heathens who control the Holy Land at the time this novel takes place, despite numerous Crusades set about to address this.

Beyond these rather significant changes from the history we’re familiar with, the world in which The Devils takes place is rather similar to our own from the same time period. The nations are the same, with the same names, and the Church of Rome is really quite similar to the Catholic Church of the era. Well, once we adjust to the Pope being a ten-year-old girl who may or may not be the second coming of the savior. Aside from those minor tweaks, the world is the same one we learned about in history books.

A fastidious and bumbling monk, a crusader cursed by a witch to never die, a vampire, an arrogant necromancer, a veritable jack of all trades, a captive elf, and a werewolf are tasked with escorting an impoverished street thief from the Holy City to the kingdom where she’s supposedly the heir to an empire, and the key to healing the rift that’s divided the Church into two competing factions. Assuming they can survive the threats posed by the three princes who are vying for the throne, and the machinations of others who aren’t in the open, they’ll have to survive working together—which might just be the more challenging element.

Abercrombie’s book is large enough that he gives each of these characters plenty of time to breathe and to flesh themselves out on the page, and I’m grateful for that. Despite the fascinating twists in the history leading up to the narrative, it’s the characters who really make this story great. None of them are two-dimensional, and they’re all forced to face not only a plethora of challenges in pursuit of their mission, but to confront their own presuppositions and flaws along the way.

I was sad to say goodbye when I finished the story, but I was thrilled to discover that there’s a sequel coming next year. You have plenty of time to work your way through The Devils before The Heretics comes out in May of 2027.

Nikolas P. Robinson is an avid consumer of books, movies, and television, especially where horror, science fiction, and fantasy are concerned. When he isn’t consuming media, he’s creating it as an author, photographer, videographer, and news producer in Portland, Oregon.

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