Book Review: "Empire of the Vampire" by Jay Kristoff

My favourite book series of all time has to be Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles”. As an early teen, I read “Interview with the Vampire” and I was hooked on to each one until the last one came out. Gothic and beautifully written, they really immerse you in the time period that housed some of the most wonderful vampires ever to grace the page. Whether it be the Romantic era of Louis and Lestat or the more Medieval and Renaissance era of Armand. The vampires were each incredible products of romance, gothic violence, fire and fury. In Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” - vampires are vile and horrid creatures of the night in which they feed on prey and again, the book is written with such elegance and grace that you feel conflicted about whether you really do hate them or not. Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” is abhorrently terrifying with its Nosferatu looking vampires that have zero mercy whatsoever and are there only to scare the hell out of you. Again, the book is brilliantly written with each of our inclusions honing the atmosphere carefully, curating every step that the vampire makes and giving a narrative that has pretty much been unrivalled in their field. I really wish I could say the same for this disappointment of a book. “Empire of the Vampire” was a book that someone recommended to me online and only after we had both finished it, I thought that it was a complete waste of time. Here is why…

Instead of being written with grace, elegance and style in which either a modern gothic horror ensues like Stephen King, or in which a romantic pursuit of evil takes place like in Anne Rice’s novels - this book is written with the kind of style that makes you think it was by a fourteen year old who was told they could use a swear word if they wanted. Littering the book are these profanities, many of which don’t actually read like someone would say them and are possibly there to make the book sound ‘edgy’ and ‘cool’. I personally thought it was tasteless and a bad option in many of the cases.

Instead of having a great amount of dark atmosphere, a macabre and gothic fantasy world in which this narcissistic beast lived (like Lestat or Dracula), we instead have these gory violence scenes that are more suited to a teenager on Reddit with too much time on their hands. It has no grace, it has no skill and there is nothing within them that makes them compelling to read. It feels like the content is meant to be for adults but the writing style is more suited to children. It was laboured to read therefore, and I can’t mark it as anything else but a 2/5 - luckily enough I didn’t give it a one because I was sure as hell considering it.

The book itself is overpacked with useless stuff such as drawings and artworks of the characters and not one page separating a volume from another, but two pages - one for the volume number and title and the next for some sort of epitaph. I personally think that this was deliberate to make the book look longer than it is. However the issue mainly arises with the writing style. A book that is written to be read by adults is of no use being written in the style of a child. The sentences are often boring and the characters are flat. I believe that if the author was to separate every three volumes into a separate novel then he would have left more room for atmosphere. This book feels like a rush to get something out since he had been named a bestselling author and wanted to make money of that name. Not a good start at all.