EDIT: At the time of reading the book and writing this post, I was unaware of the controversy and problems surrounding Jay Kristoff, I was informed shortly afterwards. This does not change my opinion of the book itself, it is about separating the art from the artist.
To those readers who love and miss classic vampires in fiction but still appreciate a story's own unique twist on them, Jay Kristoff's Empire of the Vampire is just the book for you. It is bold, bloody, and utterly blasphemous! This book is what would happen if you put Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, Paul Hoffman's The Left Hand of God trilogy and Mark Lawrence's The Book of the Ancestor trilogy together and made a whole new epic tale that evokes similar themes but still stands apart from them. The story follows the last Silversaint, Gabriel de León, as he tells his story about how the last sunrise changed his and his family's life, his training to fight vampires, and the quest he found himself on chasing humanity's final hope against the endless night. It is an epic tale not to be missed.
The tale is mostly told in the first-person by Gabriel as he is the one recounting his tale in what feels like a chronicle. The style of the narrative draws you in and captures your attention. It often feels like you are being told a story by someone orally as well as getting lost in the anticipation of past events. Though it is all in the past for the narrator, it feels like the present for the reader. The second narrative voice throughout the novel is quite a useful prompt in many ways - it reminds the reader that this is all history to those actually present but also helps to remind the reader of important events that have happened earlier in the book. The latter of which is something that I know I appreciate as a reader considering how much you can forget when reading a book with 700+ pages. The second narrative voice lends tremendously to the world-building in a different way to a lone first-person narrator. Instead of having one narrator tell you everything there is to know as it comes along, the second narrator makes it more like a conversation where you retain more information rather than info dumps.
The story follows two separate timelines that it switches between, both with Gabriel at the centre of them - it is his story after all. There are switches between the two timelines but they're quite infrequent as both timelines have a lot of bearing on the plot but need to remain quite separate as they have different stories to tell. With these switches between timelines, there is never a slump in where the story is going. It always changes at the perfect time, where you need to move away from a particular turn of events but also enticing enough that you look forward to getting back to it after a few chapters. The story has quite a depth to it that is very well thought out, many of the story threads stand on their own very strongly as well as lending to each other making sense of everything. There are various points where Gabriel essentially spoils something about later events in the book or something that doesn't even happen in this book, in the telling of his story but this is one of those times where knowing the end result does not spoil the journey to that destination. There are many times when Gabriel, or his wonderful second narrator, tells us something that doesn't happen for another couple of hundred pages but they never give so much away that the story becomes predictable. It's a taster of information you don't get the full satisfaction of until you read on more.
The characters are very well thought out, they are all rounded out in their own unique mould making them stand apart from each other quite clearly. Even the characters beyond those Gabriel has a close relationship with are so intricately moulded that there is not a single disposable character around. It makes you care about every single one of them, about finding out who they are and what became of them. By the time I had passed the halfway point, I felt like I was on the tenth book in the series because of how invested I had become in these characters and the quest that many of them believed in wholeheartedly. It's rare that an author can make me so attached to multiple characters so quickly.
This book is filled with illustrations relating to the characters and the story, illustrated by Bon Orthwick, whose artwork came to my attention in the collector's edition of Leigh Bardugo's Crooked Kingdom. The ARC only gives black and white illustrations for the first 100 pages of the book to give a taste of what's to come (pun unintentionally intended). I think Orthwick's artistic style is well suited to the book and the illustrations are quite beautiful. After the first 100 pages, whenever there was a blank page marked for illustration I could just about picture from the words on the page what may be going there and I can't wait to see all the completed works. They lend themselves so well to the story, it doesn't feel like a visual aid, just significant people, places and events commemorated in artistic form.
Reasons to Recommend:
- If you enjoy classic vampires, lack of reflections and vulnerability to holy symbols included
- If you're a fan of any of the books I mentioned in the opening paragraph
- Enriched characters whose journey is a treat to follow
- A strong string of stories tied up together
- Heartwrenching relationships between characters, romantic (LGBT+ inclusive), familial and platonic
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