The fool's tasks lined up in crushingly tedious procession. Run. Practice. Shit a turd. Write a letter. Eat. Watch. Write a turd. Shit a letter. Eat. Bed.

It's a dark book, with rough characters and some pretty gorey deaths. Ambercrombie does a great job with his battle scenes, showing the confusion of war and the costs of being a hero. On coming to after the war I found myself stumbling on lines I had already read in before the war. Was this laziness on the authors part? Or was he saying this is just an endless cycle. Is before and after the war the same thing as after one war at some point becomes before another war? Other than the main POV characters we get some brief POV's from other characters. 2 of these were really interesting as in the first the POV character is killed and the narration passes to his killer who is killed in turn and so on. This was really well written and creates a mounting sense of genuine danger to the characters especially when a major POV character takes over. In another chapter we follow a command as it is passed, along with the narration, down the line from the general. This scene shows us the arguments that can exist even among the same side in a war. While the third chapter like this, which this time just jumped around randomly, was disappointing this was still a cool feature that broadened the perspective on the battle. Highlights included a good soldier reflecting on his girl at home as he dies 'she'll probably marry her cousin, terrible business that', two officers (validly) criticising each other in consecutive POV's and a mortally injured cavalryman leading a doomed charge. I also enoyed how Heroes presented war as a hypocritical, horrific endeavour without ever becoming preachy or self righteous. The Gooch carried on, heedlessly. “This is supposed to be a gritty military story, about armies and warfare and all that cool shit. Shouldn't it have at least the basics right in regards to military structures and tactics? I mean, if the author has free license to go completely off the grid about this stuff, why not include jeeps and predator drones? That's about as plausible as an ostensibly renaissance-era army set up like a - “ Lasmark could only swallow and ready himself as his men flung down their weapons around him. As they turned and ran for the river or the hill, too far, far too far away. As the makeshift line of his company and the company beside them dissolved leaving only a few knots of the most stunned and hard-bitten to face the Northmen. He could see how many there were, now. Hundreds of them. Hundreds upon hundreds. A flung spear impaled a man beside him with a thud, and he fell screaming. Lasmark stared at him for a moment. Stelt. He’d been a baker.

But with a war comes a lot of downtime. But scenes without fighting are boring right? Wrong! Some of the best quotes came out of the downtime, and many times I found myself laughing out loud. For me, there’s simply no one that can write grimdark fantasy as good as Abercrombie. The Heroes has been claimed by many Abercrombie’s fans to be his best book so far, and although I disagree because in my opinion that crown still belongs to Last Argument of Kings, I rank The Heroes as his third-best work so far. I loved it almost as much as I loved Before They Are Hanged, which is a LOT. The main problem I faced with this one is that it had too many characters for my liking and the way they are introduced did not work for me. I don’t mind books with many characters if they are introduced well and given the appropriate time to do that but I do mind it when it feels like info dumping and it becomes too hard for me to remember who is who. If there was not a character’s list at the beginning of the book, I would have probably lost interest much faster. I prefer when characters are introduced gradually and given the time to become realistic which was the case for BSC. To be fair, after 40% of the book, we say goodbye to many characters and the ones that stay are more fleshed which made the second half of the book better than the first half! Because without a doubt, Abercrombie has some things to say about war in this book. And for a book that is, on its face, about battles, it is certainly pretty critical of the whole shebang. The commentary on war was some of my favorite elements of this one, and what elevated it over Best Served Cold for me. The words froze in his throat. Cavalry had emerged from behind a village even further to their left. A considerable body of cavalry, bearing down on their flank, hooves threshing up a pall of dust. He heard the gasps of alarm, felt the mood shift from worried resolve to horror.

He could not stay here. He would never make it to the river. But he could not stay here. It had to be now. He broke from the undergrowth, running for the shallows. There were other runners everywhere, most of them without weapons. Mad, desperate faces, eyes rolling. Wetterlant saw the cause of their terror. Horsemen. Spread out across the fields, converging on the shallows, herding the fleeing Union soldiers southwards. Cutting them down, trampling them, their howls echoing across the valley. He ran on, ran on, stumbling forwards, snatched another look. A rider was bearing down on him, he could see the curve of his teeth in a tangled beard. His wonderful Sixth Regiment, his life’s work, built out of copious polish, and rigorous drill, and unflinching discipline, utterly shattered in a few insane moments. If any survived it would be those who had chosen to run first. The rawest recruits and most craven cowards. And he was one of them. His first instinct was to ask Major Culfer for his opinion. He almost opened his mouth to do it, then realised the man had been butchered by a lunatic with a metal eye.

The Rostod Regiment was outnumbered. Several companies were still following Popol blithely off towards Osrung where even more Northmen waited. Others had stopped, aware of the approaching threat on their left and seeking desperately to form lines. The Rostod Regiment was heavily outnumbered, and out of formation, and caught unsupported in the open. That isn’t the only reason I hated the novel, but it did piss me off the most. Nothing speaks the word redundancy more than an overly used metaphor. The entire novel also felt restrictive. It is essentially one big battle sequence. So, its layers of action upon action in the same boring place. I hated the end. I hated the beginning too. And I especially hated the middle. This is Joe Abercrombie’s worse book. Please bear in mind that I’m actually a big fan of this author. I’ve read all of his books, and this is the only one I strongly dislike. So, don’t hate me. I do like Joe Abercrombie, but not this book. Divided into three days, with a before and after the clash, in which a multitude of characters from both sides move, each explored in a masterly way, with dreams, grudges and personal or political motivations. But if this great multitude of characters gives substance to the novel, the true protagonist is undoubtedly the war in all its atrocity.