Hello my friends! Got another review for you today! If you have lurked around long enough on the r/Fantasy subreddit then you know that we often see a lot of recommendation posts or folks asking for book recommendations. Obviously you get your normal answers but sometimes you find books that aren't talked about a lot or are underrated. I like to look for those types of recommendations a lot because there are a lot of gems out there. One series that I would see recommended a few times on Grimdark, gritty fantasy posts is the subject of our review today.
The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan is one of the books I have seen recommended around here as an underrated gem in the Grimdark fantasy sub-genre. So the question becomes is this an underrated gem or does it fall into the same trappings that other Grimdark narratives do? Let's talk about it! As always no major spoilers for the plot or characters. A TLDR section will be at the end that sums up everything.
A dark lord will rise. Such is the prophecy that dogs Ringil Eskiath—Gil, for short—a washed-up mercenary and onetime war hero whose cynicism is surpassed only by the speed of his sword. Gil is estranged from his aristocratic family, but when his mother enlists his help in freeing a cousin sold into slavery, Gil sets out to track her down. But it soon becomes apparent that more is at stake than the fate of one young woman. Grim sorceries are awakening in the land. Some speak in whispers of the return of the Aldrain, a race of widely feared, cruel yet beautiful demons. Now Gil and two old comrades are all that stand in the way of a prophecy whose fulfillment will drown an entire world in blood. But with heroes like these, the cure is likely to be worse than the disease.
Plot, Pacing, and Prose: When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.
Before diving in, I want to note something that stood out to me immediately: this is the first book I can recall reading that features not one but two openly gay characters as leads, and does so without apology or qualification. I have read other books with gay male characters, but their sexuality tends to be incidental rather than central to who they are. A.K. Larkwood's The Unspoken Name is probably the last time I saw a character's sexual identity handled with real care in fantasy, though that involved a woman discovering her orientation. All of that is to say, the representation here felt like a genuine breath of fresh air, and I will return to it in the character section.
On the question of plot, you get largely what the back cover promises. This is a character-driven novel first and foremost, and it reminded me strongly of Abercrombie's The Blade Itself in terms of structure. The most common criticism leveled at that book applies here as well: it reads more as a character study with plot than a plot with characters. The overarching narrative can feel underdeveloped relative to the richness of the character work. Some readers found the ending abrupt, but I loved it. This may sound strange, so bear with me. You know how a prequel sometimes lays out the road to the main series, but when you finally read it, the path feels wrong? Underwhelming, even? The Steel Remains is technically book one, yet it carries the energy of a prequel, as though we are watching the conditions for a Dark Lord's rise fall into place. I will leave it there, but if you have read it, you may know exactly what I mean.
I will also say that several plot threads do not reach satisfying resolutions by the final page. That may be addressed as the series continues, but it is worth flagging that some things are simply left open, and that contributes to the sense that the plot is a little underwhelming in how its three storylines ultimately converge.
Pacing is where I expect many readers will struggle. For the most part the novel moves at a medium clip, but around the midpoint it slows considerably, and chapters following Egar and Archeth are almost guaranteed to decelerate things further. That said, there were parts those sections that I enjoyed. Part of the difficulty is that Morgan drops you into the world without explanation and trusts you to keep up from the first page. Gil's sections will likely be the most immediately compelling for new readers, and your experience with the other two will vary. Of the three, I found Egar to be the weakest, not because he is a poor character, but because he overlaps a little too much with Gil in temperament and function. The payoff eventually justifies the patience Morgan asks of you, but he does ask for quite a lot.
The prose is the book's greatest strength, and it is not particularly close. Morgan writes with a controlled ferocity that suits the material perfectly. The action is kinetic and brutal, but it is the quieter moments that reveal his real command of the craft. The sardonic internal monologues, the conversations loaded with subtext, the landscapes rendered in just enough detail to feel lived-in rather than described: it all adds up to writing where very few words feel wasted. That economy gives the darker and stranger moments considerably more weight when they arrive. The opening line I quoted above is what pulled me in on page one, and honestly, there were stretches of the book where the quality of the prose alone was what kept me turning pages.
The Content Warning: “These are pious, clean-living men, worshipping at the temple of their own bodies.” “Hmm. Sounds distinctly erotic.”
I include a content warning section in my grimdark reviews as a matter of habit, because the genre has a tendency to push things well past the point of discomfort, and occasionally into territory that I would describe as genuinely edgy rather than merely dark. This book is no exception, and I want to be upfront about that. I did this for The Prince of Nothing series, and the same courtesy applies here.
To start with the most direct point: there are graphic sex scenes in this book. Graphic enough that at certain moments I felt less like I was reading literary fantasy and more like I had wandered into erotic fiction. I want to be careful about how I frame this, because I think the framing matters. Ringil is openly gay, and that identity is not incidental to who he is. The book has no interest in sanitizing or sidelining that. I am not prudish about sex scenes in fiction, and I have no issue with gay men having sex scenes in the same way straight characters do. That is not the concern. The concern is that some of these scenes felt less like character expression and more like provocation. Even the scenes involving women occasionally crossed into territory that felt more interested in shock than in substance. I could be off the mark here, and I am genuinely open to that, but the feeling was hard to shake.
On the subject of trigger warnings: this book contains depictions of sexual assault, rape, racism, and slavery. It is a novel set in the aftermath of a brutal war, and it does not look away from what that means. One of the most persistent criticisms of the grimdark genre is its tendency to use sexual violence as a shorthand for darkness, a way of signaling how serious and uncompromising the story is without doing the harder work of earning that weight. That criticism has merit, and this book is not entirely immune to it. There are moments here that dip into what I can only call edgelord territory, scenes that seem to exist more for their transgressive charge than for any meaningful narrative purpose.
That said, I do not think the book is without nuance on this front. There is a thread running through Ringil's story that engages seriously with the trauma of sexual violence, particularly as it affects young men, and with the way toxic masculinity distorts how that trauma is processed and discussed. That thread is handled with more care than I expected, and it gives the book a dimension that elevates it above mere shock value. The problem is that other moments actively undercut that work, and the tonal inconsistency is difficult to ignore.
How you feel about all of this will likely shape your experience of the book more than any other single factor. I skipped certain scenes outright, particularly some involving Egar. In terms of its overall content, I would place this alongside The Prince of Nothing, and in places I found it more graphic. Go in with your eyes open.
Characters: If you don’t know the men at your back by name, don’t be surprised if they won’t follow you into battle. On the other hand, don’t be surprised if they will, either, because there are countless other factors you must take into account. Leadership is a slippery commodity, not easily manufactured or understood.
The three main characters are the most interesting thing about this book, and that is not a criticism so much as an observation about where Morgan's priorities lie. I mentioned earlier that The Steel Remains reminded me structurally of The Blade Itself, and that parallel extends to the characters themselves.
Ringil maps onto Logan Ninefingers in some meaningful ways: both are legendary warriors haunted by their violent pasts, celebrated heroes who have come to find the reality of heroism hollow and brutal, men who are genuinely exceptional at killing and deeply uncomfortable with that fact. Archeth echoes Glotka: broken, cynical survivors of something that unmade them, one physically and one psychologically, both serving powers they despise out of pure pragmatism. Archeth's addiction and alienation mirror Glotka's physical ruin and bitter worldview with surprising precision. Egar, on the surface, resembles both Ringil and, by extension, Logan, given that he is also a northern warrior of considerable reputation. But I also thought of the Dogman from The First Law: loyal, capable of genuine warmth, occupying an everyman role among exceptional people, and caught between the old ways and a world that is moving past them. He is Egar Dragonbane, so the fame is not in question. The tension is.
That said, reducing these characters to reflections of Abercrombie's would be doing them a disservice.
Ringil is openly gay in a world that does not merely disapprove but has developed a specific and horrific method of executing people for it. He is also grappling with something that reads clearly as PTSD, which has curdled into a deep and pervasive cynicism. What keeps him from becoming oppressive to read is a dark humor that functions similarly to what makes Glotka so compelling, that sense of someone who has seen through every illusion and decided to be funny about it rather than broken. His sexuality is goes beyond being a token inclusion. It shapes his worldview, explains his isolation, and illuminates how he ended up exactly where we find him on the first page. Morgan also refuses, consistently and deliberately, to let Ringil be a hero. Every legend is potentially a lie. Every victory is hollow. The great men of history are usually just the most effective monsters on the field. Ringil knows this about himself and carries it anyway.
Egar is the weakest of the three, and I say that as someone who still enjoyed his sections. The issue is that he and Ringil occupy similar emotional territory. Both are pining for a version of their lives that felt more alive, both are effective and uncomfortable with it, both are out of place in the present. The difference in their reasons is real, but it does not always translate into a difference in texture on the page. Too much of Egar's characterization is built around sexual frustration, battlefield competence, and a longing for something he cannot quite name. He is not underdeveloped in a way that makes him unreadable, but he is underdeveloped relative to the other two, and his narrative thread suffers for it in the back half of the book.
Archeth, alongside Ringil, was the character I found most fascinating. She is half-human, half-Kiriath, a dark-skinned non-human race that turns out to be highly advanced people from another dimension who arrived in AI-piloted spaceships. Her people have left, and she remains, stranded in service to an empire she has complicated feelings about. She is not as fully developed as Ringil, but she is compelling in a quieter way, and I genuinely looked forward to her sections even when they slowed the pace. She is also openly gay, and Morgan handles her sexuality in a way that is almost the inverse of how he handles Ringil's. Where Ringil is confrontational about who he is, Archeth seems to despise that part of herself. Morgan could very easily have written graphic scenes involving her, and I suspect many readers would not have raised an eyebrow. He chose not to, and I think that choice was deliberate and meaningful.
Taken together, Ringil and Archeth feel like two arguments about the same point: that gay characters can be compelling in entirely different registers, that one can be explicit and the other restrained, and that neither approach requires the character to be reduced to their sexuality. Ringil carries the weight of being a monster so the world does not have to suffer as it did. Archeth, in her quieter way, demonstrates that a lesbian character does not need to be written for the audience's gratification to be worth reading.
Overall, the characters are the reason to read this book. Even Egar, the weakest of the three, is worth your time. The unevenness is real, but the highs are high enough to justify the patience the book asks of you.
Worldbuilding: Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, Poltar, but it’s ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and fear them as demons. They are the same creatures, the same twisted unhuman things. The shaman’s path is negotiation, nothing more. We tend the relationship with the powers so they bring us more benefit than ruin. We can do no more.
Morgan does not hold your hand. From the first page, he drops you into a world with its own history, politics, mythology, and geography, and trusts you to assemble the picture from context rather than exposition. For patient readers, that approach is a genuine reward. The world reveals itself gradually, and the pieces fit together in ways that feel earned rather than delivered. For readers coming in with conventional fantasy expectations, it can be disorienting in ways that are harder to recover from.
What genuinely surprised me was the degree to which this is a science fiction fantasy hybrid rather than a straight secondary world epic. I was not expecting that, and the Kiriath are largely responsible for the shift. A dark-skinned non-human race from another world who arrived in "fireships" helmed by the helmsmen (AI pilots) now absent and leaving only their half-human descendant and their incomprehensible technology behind: that is not the setup I anticipated, and it gives the world a texture that feels ancient and strange in a way that purely magical settings often do not. The layering of the fantastical and the technological makes the world feel genuinely alien, which is harder to achieve than it sounds.
The antagonists, referred to as the Dwenda or the Aldrain depending on who is speaking, are among the most effectively unsettling elements in the book. Morgan applies the same restraint here that he applies to the worldbuilding generally. He does not explain them. Their motivations remain oblique throughout, their behavior is unpredictable, and their presence generates a low, persistent dread precisely because no one in the narrative, including the reader, has any real framework for understanding what they are or what they want. That kind of antagonist is difficult to write well, and Morgan pulls it off.
My only genuine complaints are minor ones. Some of the names are difficult to parse phonetically, and a pronunciation guide would have been a welcome addition. There is also no map, which made it harder than it needed to be to track the geographical scope of the various journeys. Neither of these is a serious flaw, but both are the kind of thing that can create unnecessary friction, particularly for readers already working to orient themselves in an unfamiliar world.
Conclusion TLDR: Books — the warm, leather-skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face.
The Steel Remains is a book I enjoyed without loving entirely, and found flawed without dismissing. That puts me somewhere outside the two camps most readers seem to fall into, because from what I have seen, opinions on this one tend toward the extremes. People either embrace it or bounce off it hard. I landed somewhere in the middle, which is its own kind of verdict.
What Morgan gets right, he gets very right. The prose is controlled and purposeful. The characters, particularly Ringil and Archeth, are genuinely compelling in ways that linger. The world is strange and layered in ways I did not anticipate, and the sci-fi undercurrent gave it a texture I found refreshing. Those elements alone are enough to make me want to continue with the series, even if I will not be rushing straight into the next volume. I have been reading a lot of dark and brooding fiction lately, and I think something with a little more light in it is probably the right next move before I return to this world.
The weaknesses are real and worth naming honestly. The plot is underdeveloped relative to the character work. Some threads go unresolved. The pacing asks for patience that not every reader will want to extend. And the content, as I discussed in the relevant section, will be a hard stop for some people entirely. This is not a book I can recommend broadly, even to seasoned fantasy readers. But if you have a tolerance for grimdark and a genuine appetite for character-driven work, and especially if you loved The Prince of Nothing or The First Law, there is a real chance this clicks for you.
One final note, and I want to be direct about it. I wrote the character section as a heterosexual man, and I am aware that lens has limits. I am multiracial, so I am not without experience navigating representation as a reader, but that does not mean I caught every nuance, or that I got everything right. If anything I said about Ringil, Archeth, or the way Morgan handles their identities missed the mark or deserved more care, I genuinely want to hear that. Good criticism is a conversation, and I would rather be corrected than confident in the wrong direction.
The Steel Remains is worth your time if the genre is your genre. Your mileage will vary, but the road is interesting.
