Eehhhhh. 
 I'm not going to lie, I picked this up because it was pitched to me as serious fantasy with a gay main character. Which... is true. But unfortunately that alone didn't save this book from being underwhelming. 
 Joe Abercrombie blurbed this, so I guess I should've expected it to be over-the-top grimdark excessive sex and gore. Which wasn't even my problem with it. But it was at times really excessive. 
 Also, yes, I get it, the world you've built isn't tolerant of different sexualities, but could you just NOT with the uses of "f*ggot". UGH. It really does seem like Ringil was gay for the shock value and not for any other meaningful reason--like say, diversity. 
 Most of the book is tediously slow and unnecessarily confusing. And though some of the mythos was cool once it sort of got explained, I just didn't really care about anyone or what was going on. There are other books in this series, which I'm going to have to give a hard pass. I might still check out Morgan's Altered Carbon, since most of what I've read about it is different enough. But we'll see.