What to Read After The Blade Itself
Joe Abercrombie's The Blade Itself does something most fantasy only attempts: it makes you love characters who are genuinely terrible — the torturer who extracts confessions for a regime he privately despises, the nobleman who thinks he's a hero and is wrong about everything, the barbarian warrior who is exactly as dangerous as his reputation. The best books to read after it share that same moral architecture: dark wit, no safe characters, and a refusal to let the world reward idealism. The first entry below is the direct sequel — read that next. The rest are for when you've finished the trilogy.
- 1
Before They Are Hanged
Read This Nextby Joe Abercrombie
The direct sequel and the only correct next read. Three campaigns unfold simultaneously: a quest into the ancient west, a desperate siege in the south, and a brutal war in the North. Abercrombie expands the scope dramatically while continuing to dismantle every heroic fantasy convention he introduced in The Blade Itself. The characters you've grown to love — and love to distrust — get worse and better in equal measure.
- 2
The Name of the Wind
by Patrick Rothfuss
The recommendation for readers who loved The Blade Itself's unreliable narrators and its interest in the gap between myth and reality. Kvothe tells his own legend, and Rothfuss embeds a growing suspicion that the legend and the man are very different things — exactly what Abercrombie does with every heroic archetype he introduces. The prose is more lyrical, the world more wonder-filled, but the intellectual project of dismantling the hero is identical.
- 3
The Lies of Locke Lamora
by Scott Lynch
A gang of con artists in a Renaissance-inspired fantasy city pull increasingly dangerous heists while a mysterious crime lord hunts them. Lynch shares Abercrombie's dark humour and his love of morally grey characters, and Locke Lamora's crew has the same ensemble chemistry as Glokta, Jezal, and Logen — people you're not sure you should be rooting for, but absolutely are. The plotting is more theatrical than Abercrombie's, the wit sharper; the grimdark is there underneath.
- 4
A Game of Thrones
by George R.R. Martin
The book that proved to mainstream readers what Abercrombie was already demonstrating: that fantasy heroes could lose, die, and be wrong about everything. Martin's political architecture is more operatic than Abercrombie's, the cast larger, the world more mythic — but the core commitment to consequence, to no safe characters, and to systems that corrupt everyone who touches them is exactly the same. Essential companion reading.
- 5
Red Rising
by Pierce Brown
A mining slave is remade and sent to infiltrate the ruling class to start a revolution. Brown has Abercrombie's interest in class and systems — the way power shapes people, the way institutions resist change, the cost of idealism in a world that punishes it. Red Rising moves faster than The Blade Itself, the sci-fi bones showing clearly, but the moral complexity and the willingness to let heroism fail are recognisably grimdark.
- 6
The Way of Shadows
by Brent Weeks
A street boy apprenticed to the most feared assassin in a city of corruption and compromise. Weeks builds a grimy, densely realised city in the same vein as Abercrombie's Union, and the Night Angel trilogy's central question — what the skills of violence actually do to a person — mirrors The Blade Itself's sustained examination of the same problem. Darker than Abercrombie in some ways, more emotionally direct, and just as hard to put down.
- 7
Prince of Thorns
by Mark Lawrence
The Broken Empire begins with a thirteen-year-old leading a band of road killers through a post-apocalyptic fantasy landscape. Lawrence takes the grimdark protagonist further than Abercrombie does — Jorg Ancrath is genuinely disturbing rather than morally grey, and the Broken Empire trilogy is a test of how far the subgenre can push before the reader breaks first. For Blade Itself readers who want to see what extreme grimdark looks like.
- 8
The Poppy War
by R.F. Kuang
A war orphan aces her empire's entrance exam, earns a place at the country's most prestigious military academy, and discovers she carries a power neither she nor anyone around her knows how to control. Kuang's novel is grimdark military fantasy inspired by 20th-century Chinese history, and it does not soften what that means. The second half is devastating in the same way Abercrombie's war sequences are: you understand exactly why the horror is happening, which makes it worse.
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