Do I need to read the main series first?

No. The B&KB novellas are standalone comic-horror stories that can be read independently, though fans of the main series will appreciate the world-building context.

How long is Blood Follows?

It is a novella — approximately 100 pages. The B&KB stories are slim by design, written as palate cleansers between main-series novels.

Is it funny or scary?

Both. The dark comedy comes from the gap between Bauchelain's impeccable civility and the absolute horror of what he and Korbal Broach do. Readers describe it as reading like a very dark British sitcom.

Blood Follows

A Tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach

Dark Fantasy Fantasy

Pages: 125
Published: 2002
Language: English

In a plague-ridden city of corpses and desperate people, a mortician named Emancipor Reese is hired by two unusual gentlemen seeking a manservant. Bauchelain is a necromancer of refined manners and absolute immorality. Korbal Broach is his silent partner, whose hobbies involve things best left unexamined. Blood Follows is the first novella in the Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach series: dark comedy operating at the intersection of noir and horror, where the most monstrous characters are also the most competent and the most entertaining. Erikson deploys the duo as a kind of grotesque relief valve — their adventures are standalone and slim, written between mainline novels, and showcase a side of the Malazan world that is pitch-black and gleefully absurd.

Prose complexity: 3/10

Dark Gritty Atmospheric Funny

Morally Grey Anti-Hero Survival Villain Protagonist

Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson was born Steve Rune Lundin in Toronto in 1959 and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He trained as an archaeologist and anthropologist — completing fieldwork on Indigenous sites in the Canadian Shield — before earning a graduate degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He writes under a pen name adopted to avoid confusion with the American novelist Steve Erickson. The world of the Malazan Book of the Fallen has its origins not in a manuscript but in a tabletop roleplaying campaign....

BauchelainProtagonist

A necromancer of exquisite manners and total amorality who regards human life as a resource rather than a sacred thing.

Korbal BroachProtagonist

Bauchelain's silent, unsettling companion whose particular interests involve harvesting organs from the living.

Emancipor ReeseProtagonist

A put-upon manservant whose previous employers all died violently — a pattern that is about to continue.

All characters in Blood Follows

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to read the main series first?
No. The B&KB novellas are standalone comic-horror stories that can be read independently, though fans of the main series will appreciate the world-building context.
How long is Blood Follows?
It is a novella — approximately 100 pages. The B&KB stories are slim by design, written as palate cleansers between main-series novels.
Is it funny or scary?
Both. The dark comedy comes from the gap between Bauchelain's impeccable civility and the absolute horror of what he and Korbal Broach do. Readers describe it as reading like a very dark British sitcom.