“A Vampire with Manners”: Baron Rikard and the Comic Afterlife of the Aristocraticé Vampire in Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils

Baron Rikard in Joe Abercrombie’s The Devils offers a comic yet disturbing reworking of the aristocratic vampire myth. Rather than inventing a radically new vampire, Abercrombie builds Rikard out of recognisable elements from the Gothic and post-Gothic tradition: noble status, longevity, seductive eloquence, blood-drinking, bodily rejuvenation, and predatory charm. Yet these features are repeatedly deflated through bathos, social comedy, and grimdark irony. Rikard is dangerous not despite his manners, but through them. His politeness turns predation into etiquette, while his appetite is expressed in the language of taste, class, and refinement. Drawing on close reading, myth criticism, and fantasy studies, this paper shows how Abercrombie transforms the vampire from a figure of Gothic terror into a self-conscious relic of earlier traditions. Rikard’s power lies not only in supernatural violence, but also in performance: he speaks, seduces, remembers, and aestheticizes his own monstrosity. Ultimately, The Devils does not simply parody the vampire myth. It shows how durable that myth remains when translated into the comic and morally compromised world of grimdark fantasy.