It is possible that some readers, upon reading the back cover text of this novel, might think: another book about femicides? And what is more: another narrator witness reflecting on the moral right to write about the subject? But it is enough to follow four news items to come across the evidence that the murders of women –and, specifically, those committed by the victims' husbands or romantic partners– never end. As if it were impossible to reprogram certain brains and extirpate the conviction that the woman they claim to love with madness is their property and cannot do anything they do not consider appropriate: wear certain clothes, talk to other men, go out to work every day... They seem like things from another world, or another era, but the arguments of past times or cultural otherness do not even need to be taken out of the closet. It does not matter the sociocultural level, the color of the skin, or the language of the assassins: the scourge is everywhere. And it must also be addressed from writing, which is capable of recounting great violence and enormous ambiguities.

The last time that Joe Abercrombie (Lancaster, 1974) visited Barcelona, just two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic confined half the world to its home. Perhaps due to the pre-apocalyptic atmosphere he sensed in his new novel. The devils (Alianza, 2025; translated into Spanish by Manu Viciano) the Catalan capital is enigmatically mentioned: it is a place where something terrible and at the same time indeterminate has happened. The British author, who for more than a decade has been one of the most prominent references in the fantasy genre, presents in the book his most over-the-top story, starring a peculiar expedition, made up of a monk and several supernatural creatures such as a vampire, a werewolf, an elf and a necromancer. Their mission is to accompany Alex, young heir to the Serpent Throne, from southern Europe to Troy, which Abercrombie imagines as the capital of the East.