The Blade Itself
Grimdark's defining debut: the close-voice, blackly comic register it established is now the house style of adult fantasy, and Glokta is the subgenre's signature creation.
Book Entry · Fantasy
Best Served Cold
by Joe Abercrombie · 2009 · The First Law
What is Best Served Cold about?
Monza Murcatto, the Snake of Talins, most successful mercenary captain in Styria, is thrown down a mountain by her employer with her brother murdered beside her — and survives, rebuilt and ruinously motivated. Seven men were in that room; the book is seven escalating revenges, pursued across a Renaissance-Italy-flavoured land war with a crew including a numerate torturer, a poisoner and his apprentice, a Northman trying very hard to be good (Friendly, the most unsettling, merely counts things). Abercrombie's standalone thesis on vengeance: every kill costs more than it settles, and the mountain's view at the end belongs to the person who least deserves it. His best single book, by wide consensus.
Why it matters
The model post-trilogy standalone: proof grimdark could carry Jacobean revenge-tragedy structure at blockbuster pace, and the consensus pick for Abercrombie's masterwork.
Where does it sit in the series?
Logen Ninefingers, Inquisitor Glokta, the wizard Bayaz and the gap between heroic archetype and human wreckage: grimdark's definitive trilogy and its standalone successors.
In the Guide from The First Law:
- The Blade Itself (2006)
- Best Served Cold (2009)
Read next
The Black Company
The founding text of military fantasy and grimdark's true wellspring: Erikson's Malazan and Abercrombie's First Law both descend directly from Croaker's Annals, as their authors have said in as many words.
The Diamond Throne
The Elenium demonstrated the Eddings machine ran just as well with older protagonists and darker church politics — and its weary knight-errant prefigured a generation of middle-aged fantasy leads.