The first book of this trilogy is where I almost bounced, exceptional characters but a slow-burn structure that took its time letting them actually collide with each other, and I remember thinking after the first two hundred pages that I couldn’t tell yet if this was going to be great or just competent. It’s a fair complaint I’ve seen echoed elsewhere, there’s nothing here that makes you actively angry with it, and yet the first half is already fuzzy in my memory a few months out.
Then the second and third books commit fully to what the first was setting up, and the payoff is enormous. Logen Ninefingers carries most of it for me, a supposedly reformed killer whose past keeps surfacing in ways that undercut every bit of growth he thinks he’s earned, and Glokta the torturer runs a close second, some of the darkest, funniest internal narration I’ve read in fantasy, self-loathing delivered with real comic timing. Abercrombie’s whole project seems to be taking every fantasy convention, the wise wizard, the noble journey, the reformed rogue, and showing you the actual cost underneath it, no rainbows, no easy comfort at the end of the darkness.
Middle books in trilogies are rarely perfect, and Before They Are Hanged does bite off slightly more plot than it can fully chew in one volume, but the third book resolves nearly every open strand in a way that felt earned rather than convenient, unexpectedly so in a few places I won’t spoil. It’s brutal, it’s often bleak, but it’s addictive in the way a good long campaign is addictive, you finish one session already wanting the next. Not for anyone looking for a tidy hero’s journey. For anyone who wants the genre’s tropes taken apart by someone who clearly loves them anyway, this delivers.