Bauchelain and Korbal Broach Books in Order

The Bauchelain and Korbal Broach stories are Malazan’s gleefully rotten side alley. Instead of following legions and gods, these novellas zero in on two unapologetically terrible necromancers and their exhausted manservant, Emancipor Reese, as they leave a trail of horror and black comedy across the fringes of the world.

The first tale, Blood Follows, begins in the city of Lamentable Moll, where someone is butchering citizens in ugly fashion. Emancipor, a perpetually unlucky working man whose employers keep dying on him, is desperate for a job when Bauchelain and the silent, unsettling Korbal Broach walk into town. The murder mystery framework quickly bends to showcase the trio’s dynamic: Emancipor’s weary practicality, Bauchelain’s refined villainy, and Korbal Broach’s wordless, deeply wrong appetites.

From there the series wanders. The Healthy Dead drops them into the city of Quaint, where civic leaders enforce “virtue” with murderous zeal and the necromancers are hired to restore balance in the most destructive way possible. The Lees of Laughter’s End traps everyone on a cursed ship sailing through an eldritch stretch of ocean, while The Wurms of Blearmouth strands them near a miserable coastal town ruled by a petty sorcerous tyrant.

Later tales like Crack’d Pot Trail and The Fiends of Nightmaria further loosen the connection to the main Malazan storyline and lean into satire. In one, a group of literary enemies trek across a wasteland, knowing that only one storyteller will be allowed to live. In another, Bauchelain briefly becomes king of Farrog, Korbal Broach its grand bishop, and the pair respond to unrest by executing artists and poking at a neighbouring land of literal Fiends.

Throughout, you get glimpses of familiar elements—Tiste, undead, the Malazan Empire—but the focus stays tight on small-scale disasters: rigged civic reforms, doomed voyages, grotesque cults, and the hapless ordinary people caught in the blast radius of the necromancers’ schemes. The tone swings between grim horror, slapstick and sly social commentary, often in the span of a single scene.

You don’t need to have read the main series to enjoy these, though Malazan readers will recognise a few names and in-jokes. Think of them as compact, self-contained tales where Erikson can poke fun at authority, civility and heroism while letting his worst characters have all the best lines.