Just finished reading The Devils by Joe Abercrombie last night and it was SO good and had characters I WANT TO REBLOG ART OF but its title is too generic for anything to show up in the tumblr search :((((
Its about a “suicide squad” of classic gothic horror baddies who are members of The Chapel of the Holy Expediency - a secret branch of the church who send death-row heathens and heretics to do their dirty work:
Viking shield-maiden axe-bitch werewolf
Vampire who tells the most fascinating story about his wife’s dumpling recipe
The third best necromancer in europe
An invisible elf who escaped the circus
A former pirate/jack-of-all-trades
A knight cursed by his ex a witch to never die
Led by a monk who would much rather be an accountant and not in this situation At All
Bound by magical papal decree, their mission is to escort Alexia - a cut purse discovered to be the missing heiress to the trojan empire - to Troy and see her crowned. Unfortunately, her four powerful cousins would rather see her dead in a ditch.
It takes place on an alternate earth circa ~1200 that’s been shaped by a few major differences: Magic is very much real, Christ was a woman (misogyny being the reason for the east/west schism), the Roman Empire never existed (Troy succeeded Carthage as the dominant power in the Mediterranean after their capitol was sucked into a portal to hell), and the crusades were fought against a horde of sharp-toothed man-eating elves. I’m not usually a fan of alternate earths as a setting but this world was really interesting to me - every new detail mentioned in passing got my brain working about The Implications.
Anyway yeah go read The Devils it was good and I liked it and am looking forward to more stories set in this world!
