The spiritual framework of Empire of the Vampire is heavily inspired by the iconography and dogma of Christianity broadly and Roman Catholicism in particular. Its central figure, the Redeemer, is an analog for Jesus Christ—tortured to death for humanity’s sake. His mode of execution, a wheel, stands in for the cross; characters wear wheel icons and make the sign of a wheel in a way reminiscent of crossing oneself. The “Mothermaid,” too, has a direct parallel: the Virgin Mary, a significant figure in all branches of Christianity but one particularly revered in Catholic tradition. The dominant religion, known as the One Faith, also includes a holy order of knights (the Silversaints), much as the Crusades saw the creation of military orders like the Knights Templar. Meanwhile, the One Faith’s emphasis on martyrs, visually represented on everything from sword hilts to stained glass windows, suggests the centrality of saints in Catholic worship. The Holy Grail, a major plot point, is lifted directly from Christian lore, though the book ultimately draws on the unorthodox interpretation of the Grail as a symbol of Jesus’s/the Redeemer’s bloodline (most famously explored in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code).

The most significant and complex parallel concerns blood. Catholicism teaches that the sacrament of the Eucharist involves the literal consumption of Christ’s body and blood. The practice’s most direct novelistic parallel is sanctus, the smoking of powdered vampire blood, which is similarly described as a sacrament. However, the act resonates differently in a novel concerned with vampirism. Rather than a means of accessing a messiah’s sacrificial love, the consumption of blood is frequently intertwined with violence and predation, hinting at the novel’s moral ambiguity; religion is not an unqualified force for good.

More broadly, the familiar structure of Catholicism provides a backdrop for the novel’s central thematic exploration: the crisis of faith in a world overwhelmed by suffering. The protagonist, Gabriel de León, directly confronts this crisis through his struggle with the problem of evil, a theological paradox famously articulated by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. This argument questions how a benevolent, omnipotent God can coexist with the reality of evil. The unnamed narrator, implied to be Gabriel, voices this dilemma in the novel’s opening pages, questioning why an all-powerful deity would permit the horrors that plague his world: “If he’s both willing and able to put paid to it all, how can this evil exist in the first place?” (3). The apocalyptic event of “daysdeath” serves as the ultimate test of faith, creating a world where evil not only exists but thrives, and prayers seemingly go unanswered. By grounding Gabriel’s personal anguish in a long-standing philosophical debate, Kristoff uses the familiar imagery of organized religion to explore the human search for meaning and divine justice in the face of seemingly indiscriminate cruelty.