Blood and Faith: The Unholy Path of The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Joe Abercrombie, it’s that the line between good and evil is often painted in shades of crimson. In The Devils, Abercrombie’s trademark grimdark style is applied to a brand new world where righteousness is a luxury few can afford, and morality is a matter of survival.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this is just another tale of blood-soaked conflict—this is a story where the cost of salvation is written in the blood of those who would dare to walk the path of righteous.

We meet Brother Diaz, an earnest, devout man, summoned to the Sacred City with dreams of commendations and divine appointments. But, as is often the case with Abercrombie’s characters, fate has a different, far darker plan for him. His new charge is a motley crew of killers, sorcerers, and monstrous outcasts—people whose very existence seems to be a repudiation of everything Brother Diaz believes in. His mission? To lead them on a journey that will demand acts of unimaginable brutality in the name of what is supposedly good.

There’s a delicious irony in the fact that Brother Diaz, our idealistic protagonist, must rely on what he would have once considered the unholy in order to achieve his goals. It's here that Abercrombie's deep cynicism about human nature comes through. Diaz is forced to come to terms with the grim reality that sometimes, the best way to achieve a righteous end is through decidedly unholy means. It’s an exploration of faith, morality, and the ugly compromises we make when the world isn’t as clear-cut as we'd like to believe.

This moral ambiguity isn’t new to Abercrombie’s readers—his First Law series established him as a master of antiheroes and morally grey characters long before this. What The Devils brings to the table, however, is a particularly stark reflection on faith and divine will. Diaz, who thought himself a servant of the light, finds himself shackled to a group of people who would break every commandment, burn every holy text, and destroy everything he once held sacred. He is forced to become something less than a man of God, while desperately trying to keep some semblance of his faith intact. This dissonance is palpable, and Abercrombie’s writing captures Diaz’s internal struggle with a haunting authenticity.

In many ways, The Devils feels like a more dangerous, more raw version of what we see in Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff. Both stories feature characters walking into a morally barren world, where ideals are shattered by the cruelties of life. But where Kristoff’s vampire-driven epic is drenched in gothic opulence and dark fantasy, Abercrombie’s world is grounded in cold, brutal realism. The stakes in The Devils are more visceral: it’s not just about life and death, but about the soul’s fragility when faced with overwhelming corruption.

The narrative moves with a fierce, unstoppable momentum, punctuated by Abercrombie’s sharp, cynical wit. But it’s not all bleakness and doom; there’s a twisted beauty in the way the characters are drawn. They’re not good, not bad—they’re human, and as such, they embody all the contradictions that make us who we are. The elves, the princes, the murderers, the sorcerers—they’re not simply archetypes; they’re complex individuals with their own codes of survival, and the tensions between them crackle with tension.

Ultimately, The Devils is a story about what it means to be human in a world where the line between good and evil is blurred beyond recognition. Abercrombie makes no bones about the fact that sometimes the only way to protect the world is by embracing the darkness within it. But what makes it so compelling is that, in the process, we come to understand that the darkness isn’t just something external to be fought—it’s something that resides within all of us.

In the end, perhaps Brother Diaz’s greatest challenge isn’t his mission or the monsters he faces, but the slow, inevitable unraveling of his own soul as he trudges further down a path of bloody deeds in the name of holy ends. If you’re looking for a tale of good versus evil, this is not the book for you. But if you’re ready to confront the murky depths of human nature, The Devils is a journey worth taking.

And, as ever, it’s a bloody one.