The Devils
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Joe Abercrombie on The Devils
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A shelved idea that refused to stay buriedThe concept behind The Devils was not new when Abercrombie finally committed to it. A YA editor’s commission years earlier had conjured the image of a papal authority deploying monsters to handle problems the righteous couldn’t touch. He recognized at once that it was the wrong idea for the wrong brief, set it aside, and wrote Half a King instead. The image sat dormant through two more trilogies before resurfacing the moment he finished the Age of Madness and started asking what came next.
The idea for the pope’s monsters loitered around, and when I finished the Age of Madness and was thinking about what to do next, it was the thing that floated to the surface of the fetid pool that is my mind.
Nine First Law books meant nine books of invented geography, deep continuity, and reader expectations that had to be honored. After two decades inside that world, the weight of it was the thing he most wanted to set down. He described the appeal of The Devils in terms of scale: smaller, tighter, less obligated.
I felt like I wanted to recharge the batteries, try something slightly different. Slightly different in format. Something a bit more focused. Something that was not quite such a big and complicated tapestry.
Freed from the demands of his own invented world, he found a practical bonus in setting the story in a version of real medieval Europe: the cartography was already done. He noted the advantage with the self-deprecating candor that runs through most of his public statements about his own working habits.
For a writer who is as incredibly lazy as I am, that is a big advantage. You don’t have to do too much kind of drawing of maps, because the maps are already there.
The Age of Madness had separated its ensemble across parallel storylines, which meant characters who rarely shared a scene. Coming out of that, Abercrombie knew exactly what he had missed and what The Devils needed to put back at its center.
One thing that I wanted to do with this book was get back to my roots of writing a set of mismatched weirdos taking the piss out of each other fundamentally. That is the heart of this book, I would say. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
One reversal that redesigned an entire worldThe setting needed to be recognizable enough for jokes and references to land, but loose enough that it wouldn’t compete with the characters for the reader’s attention. Abercrombie deliberately resisted the kind of rigorous world-building that had defined the First Law universe, inverting a handful of historical outcomes and then letting the logic stay deliberately unresolved.
The idea for this book was for the setting to feel like a weird fever dream, close enough to medieval Europe to seem vaguely familiar, and for references and jokes to land, but blurred and unspecific enough that the characters would stand out more strongly.
The political and religious architecture of the book’s world grew from a single decision. Making the Saviour figure female produced a chain of consequences Abercrombie describes as almost automatic: each step followed from the one before it, and the result was a cast with more gender balance than the First Law books had ever achieved.
In the case of The Devils I made the Saviour figure a woman. Female Saviour, therefore female priesthood, female Machiavellian cardinals, ten year old girl for a Pope.
The ensemble of monsters in the book draws on genre archetypes rather than trying to subvert them at every turn. Abercrombie explains his thinking through an analogy to Westerns, where the pleasure comes from watching familiar types play out their roles with precision, not from being surprised by novelty.
I’ve always been a guy who just enjoys archetypes a lot. I used to watch a lot of Westerns. And the joy of Westerns is not seeing something different each time. It’s seeing the iteration of the same stuff each time.
The stranger characters in the group, the vampire Zuri, the werewolf Casamir, the elf Sunny, gave him little trouble. It was the two closest to ordinary human beings who demanded the most work and the most revision, precisely because the plot depended on them in ways it did not depend on the odder members of the company.
I generally find the more intense voices easier. The two relatively normal members of the cast, Alex and Brother Diaz, have to carry more of the story, more of the decisions, more of the actual character arcs. They have to develop and drive the plot in a way that some of the weirder characters don’t so much, so they were the most difficult to write, developed most along the way and needed the most revision after the fact.
Managing the book’s tonal range, gore alongside comedy, horror alongside absurdity, required no special technique because Abercrombie does not experience them as competing registers. His position on this is long-standing and applies as much to The Devils as to anything in the First Law.
My approach has always been that there’s never a bad time to be funny, and there’s never a bad time to be horrifying. Often the two work best right up against each other, in the very same scene.
That philosophy shapes the book at the sentence level. A brutal death and a throwaway joke can occupy the same paragraph without either canceling the other out, because Abercrombie treats discomfort and laughter as two expressions of the same pressure on the reader.
What he wants us to sit with
Freedom, silliness, and the reader who finishes the bookAfter two decades of books that carried unmistakable thematic weight, Abercrombie was deliberate about what he was and was not building into The Devils. He told his interviewer at The Portalist that readers are welcome to extract meaning, then bracketed the claim with the irony that has been his default register since his first interview.
Really it was an attempt by me to write something episodic and fun and a bit, is silly the right word? It probably is the right word. A little bit silly. [paraphrased from audio]
Where Abercrombie does make a serious claim about what reading his books produces, it has nothing to do with lessons delivered and everything to do with who is actually doing the work. He has offered this account in several contexts; in the version below he is most precise about what it costs the reader and what it gives the author.
The act of reading is sort of a creative partnership. People have their own feeling of the characters, their own sense of what their voices are like. The reader has to do a lot of work, a lot of imaginative work, creating what they read. It’s like having a partner, you know, a co-writer, in a way.
Working outside the First Law for the first time in his career left him with something he struggled to name without embarrassment. Coming off the Age of Madness trilogy, which ended in industrial-revolution bloodshed and political collapse, the word he eventually landed on was not gravitas.
There’s definitely freedom in starting something entirely new, especially something that’s meant to be episodic and not especially coherent. I hardly dare say the word fun, but that was what I was after.