“You ain’t the brave knight and I ain’t the swooning maiden and this ain’t no storybook,” mutters the character Shy South in Red Country, the sixth novel by gritty fantasist Joe Abercrombie. As clever as he is, Abercrombie rarely gets this meta; since the 2006 publication of his debut novel, The Blade Itself, the British author has taken numerous jabs at the tropes of epic fantasy, usually by lampooning the genre’s fluffier tendencies and exaggerating its icy, grim violence.
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