65 pages • 2-hour read
The Devils
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, religious discrimination, graphic violence, and death.
The Church
In The Devils, the Church is not simply a religious institution—it is also a symbol of authoritarian control, moral hypocrisy, ideological manipulation, and The Fallibility of Religious Institutions. Although the Church in The Devils is fictional, it often mirrors the influence of the Catholic Church in real European history, a subject on which Abercrombie is critical. The Church in the novel commands armies, controls trade routes, and wages ideological warfare. Its power is both mystical and bureaucratic, and it functions as the narrative’s most persistent authority in terms of structural power. Cardinal Zizka, head of the Earthly Curia, represents the bureaucratic core of the Church’s political machinery. Zizka is an expert manipulator and a creature of realpolitik rather than faith. Her every decision is made in the name of expediency, not morality. When she attempts to orchestrate the crowning of Emperor Michael and later accepts Alex because she is the only surviving candidate, she admits the crown is a tool of Church control.
Despite its facade of piety and virtue, the Church in The Devils is riven with hypocrisy and moral decay. One of the novel’s recurring motifs is the gap between the Church’s teachings and its actual conduct. The clergy who preach sacrifice and charity are often depicted as engaging in political treachery, greed, and authoritarian cruelty. The Holy City, ostensibly a center of virtue, is described as a “giant machine for the fleecing of the faithful” filled with sex workers, the impoverished, and exploiters (544). Abercrombie’s description of the Church’s excesses serves as a parody of historical Catholicism, especially in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation eras.
However, while the Church is depicted as antagonistic, faith is not. Brother Diaz, for example, begins questioning the hierarchy of the church and protests the treatment of the devils in the end, but remains committed to the idea of divine purpose. In his hands, religion becomes not a weapon of control, but a lens through which chaos can be made meaningful.
Monsters
The Devils engages with the traditional Western canon’s fascination with moralized monsters, using them as a motif that explores moral ambiguity and The Struggle for Redemption. Werewolves, demons, necromancers, and other supernatural figures populate the novel but are not evil. They are often the other, and the novel interrogates monstrosity as a projection rather than a fact. Monstrosity is defined by what society fears, rejects, or misunderstands.
The monsters are, therefore, defined not by what they are but by how others treat them and how they respond to that treatment. The institutions in The Devils, especially the Church, weaponize the concept of monstrosity for control. For example, Sunny has suffered torture and alienation. She is visibly different, yet more humane than many of the humans in the story. Sunny is distrusted not because of anything she has done but because she is not like them, echoing real-world prejudices toward immigrants and marginalized people. Her personhood is taken from her, which she internalizes. As she tells Alex, “I like people […] I wish I was one” (532). The novel consistently undermines this societal binary of person versus monster. Jakob of Thorn personally straddles this line: Once a champion, Jakob bears the physical and spiritual scars of centuries of war. He is no werewolf or necromancer, but he is haunted all the same by the choices he made and the sins he committed. Jakob is not perceived as monstrous by others in the way that the rest of the team is, but he views himself as just as much of one as they are, further complicating Abercrombie’s interrogation of what makes someone monstrous.
Violence
While Abercrombie writes The Devils as a grimdark novel packed with gore and violence, he doesn’t use it just as spectacle but also as a motif that comments on human nature and morality. Violence is frequently intimate, gruesome, and viscerally depicted, leaving no ambiguity about its horrific consequences.
It also inevitably consumes the self. Vigga’s transformation into a werewolf symbolizes both the destructive power of violence and the loss of self-control. Her struggles exemplify the internal battles characters face, suggesting that the true horror of violence lies in the moral and psychological corrosion it inevitably produces. Jakob, too, is trapped within a cycle of violence. Each act of violence Jakob commits only begets more violence. He turns down staying with Alex as defender of Troy, even for a reason that could be perceived as good, and tells her, “That’s how it always begins. The just cause. The good fight. Each time, I tell myself it will be different. But for me, as the fight wears on, the good wears off. Before I know it…I’ve made myself a devil” (529). The moral of Jakob’s story is that good people can do terrible things for righteous reasons, and with his depiction, the novel interrogates the idea of justified violence, furthering its exploration of sin and redemption.
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