Empire Of The Vampire
Empire of the Vampire.
Empire…of the Vampire.
It’s not just me, right? That title is really awkward, isn’t it? I think I’m going to call this book Vempire for the rest of this review.
(Note: The first half of this post will be spoiler-free, but the rest will contain major spoilers for Vempire, The Last of Us, and the first season of The Last of Us TV series)
Jay Kristoff is an Australian author and portmanteau enthusiast who has written quite a lot of novels, both adult and YA. Vempire is the first entry in an ongoing adult dark fantasy trilogy. Strangely, the book is illustrated, in a style that looks much more at home in a story aimed at teenagers. No, don’t worry, this isn’t another Secret YA novel. It’s for adults, and it feels like it…except for the illustrations. Kind of odd.
The trilogy’s premise is kind of unique. It’s set in a fairly standard fantasy setting, roughly 18th-century equivalent technology level, with regions that are clearly based on various European and Northern African countries in the real world. So far, so standard. However, rather than presenting us with this setting at a time when the status quo is firmly in place, the story picks up after a cataclysmic event has massively transformed the world.
Vampires were always a feature of this world, but there were so few of them, and they were forced by necessity to skulk in the shadows to such an extent, that most people believed they were a myth. All of that changed with the mysterious phenomenon known as Daysdeath, when a supernatural pall covered the sky and dimmed the sun’s light to such an extent that vampires could begin operating during daylight hours unscathed. Over the course of several decades their numbers swelled, culminating in a full-scale invasion as the Forever King and his undead children wage a war of genocide and enslavement against humanity.
In this they are opposed primarily by the Silversaints, an order of half-vampire monster hunters who, like their opponents, have been thrust from obscurity by Daysdeath and now take a critical role in defending the Empire. The framing story that I assume will run through all three volumes of the trilogy picks up when Gabriel de Leon, the last Silversaint, has been captured by a rival vampire bloodline some time after killing the Forever King. Interrogated by his captors, he relates the events of his life, jumping back and forth from when he discovered his supernatural powers as a teenager and was inducted into the Ordo Argent, to a time fifteen years later, after he rose to legendary status, fell into drunkenness and exile for the usual sorts of reasons fantasy heroes do that, and then joined a Dungeons & Dragons party in their bid to recover the Holy Grail and use it to end Daysdeath. Naturally, the bulk of the novel (and, I assume, the next two novels) consists of Gabriel’s chronicle of how he came to kill the Forever King—a kind of “Kingkiller Chronicle”, one could say. Presumably along the way we’ll also find out how he came to be the last Silversaint, how the Grail slipped from his grasp before he could end Daysdeath, and how he ended up a prisoner of the Chastain vampires after wiping out the dominant Voss bloodline.
One thing Vempire does really well is establish an extremely doom-metal atmosphere. It’s made abundantly clear in the framing story that humanity is comprehensively screwed despite Gabriel defeating the Forever King—another vampire ruler just took his place, the last remnants of humanity are either blood-addicted thralls or huddling behind their fortified walls waiting to be slaughtered, the Grail is “broken” in some way that’s rendered it useless, everything is fucked, the world is ending. I assume the last book will do something to reverse this, but it’s still very effective at conjuring up a powerfully gothic, doom-laden atmosphere.
Jumping back and forth from only a few years after Daysdeath, then to when the war against the vampires has begun to turn decisively in the Forever King’s favour, and on to the framing story when human civilization has been all but destroyed, we get to see the collapse from all angles. The more the book reveals about the world, the more turbo-fucked everything becomes: most crops can’t grow anymore, winters are getting worse and worse every year as the planet cools, Daysdeath has allowed a terrifying “Blight” to take root in the northern wilds that might be as big a problem as the vampires if it spreads. And also, the dominant human civilization is a harshly theocratic Empire that seems like it probably wasn’t too great even before it started crumbling. It’s kind of like Warhammer 40,000, in that it’s a setting where everything is bad and getting worse all the time.
Also like Warhammer 40k, instead of wallowing in misery it makes all of this extremely, entertainingly over the top. The vampires have magic powers! The Silversaints tattoo elaborate silver-infused imagery onto their bodies so vampires can’t touch them! And they have big swords and flails and other stupid video-game weapons, and they dress in wicked cool clothes that are very clearly just the Hunter outfits from Bloodborne! And there’s a Celtic warrior woman who has a red mountain lion and it’s all like RAWRR and it bites the bad guys and then Gabriel pulls out a sick-ass gun and is like PEW PEW and there’s a vampire lady who turns her BLOOD into a SWORD
…You may be able to tell that Vempire is kind of a silly story. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t take itself seriously; in fact, the writing is extremely extra:
“But if you do want me, Gabriel de León, then say it. Because only a coward would cherish the wanting of a thing and yet send it away. And I will not give my heart to a coward. I will give it to a lion.”
‘God and Martyrs, she was beautiful. That face shaped like heartbreak, like a secret unshared. Her eyes were darker than all the roads I’d walked and all the monstrous things I’d seen, and in them I knew I’d find a heaven if only I were willing to risk a hell.
‘“Tell me you do not want me.”
‘“I can’t,” I whispered. “God help me, I can’t.”
‘“Then take me, Gabriel.” She lifted her chin, fierce and furious. “Take me, and God and Mothermaid and Martyrs be damned with us both.”
‘And there was nothing left then: no restraint, no law, no vow that could have held me anchored through her storm. I kissed her, hungry and hard, and in that kiss, I knew salvation and damnation. A vow I could truly keep.
‘On this fire, I would burn.”
The whole thing is like that, from the first page to the last. If Jay Kristoff is in on the joke, then it’s very funny, but if he’s not then it’s kind of unbearable.
I do know how I feel about the book’s extremely liberal use of profanity, which is that it’s cringe, there’s no other word for it, this makes me cringe, it’s embarrassing. Roughly three quarters of the book’s dialogue is characters saying things like “FUCK YOUR FACE, YOU CUNT-GUZZLING WHOREBITCH” in a way that makes them sound less like broken, cynical people struggling to survive in a decaying wasteland and more like the Angry Video Game Nerd. A lot of the “funny” dialogue is similarly internetty, possessing a quality I can only describe as “Reddit-esque.”
This seems to have been a fatal flaw for many other reviewers. It only seriously impacted my reading experience when it came to Gabriel and his love interest, whose undying, tragic love is based solely on trading Witty Banter for a few weeks. Other than that, I have no idea what they see in each other, or why they fall in love. Possibly it’s because Astrid is the only person in this Empire less interesting than Gabriel is.
Okay, that’s unfair. Gabriel is interesting when he’s a little vampire lad struggling to get through vampire-hunter school, but as an older man he’s straight out of the fantasy protagonist archetype handbook, specifically Fallen Hero: Drunken Variant. If you’ve read any amount of modern dark fantasy, you’ve seen this character type, and there’s absolutely nothing about Gabriel that makes him stand out; not his multiple addictions, not his desperate revenge quest, not the motivation for that revenge quest which is very obvious right from the start even though the book tries unsuccessfully to misdirect the reader on that front.
The blandness of Gabriel is in large part made up for by the cast of characters around him, most of whom are far more interesting than he is. That does not, unfortunately, include the vampires.
Now, I love a good vampire, myself. My preference is for the grimier, more monstrous folkloric version over the opulent noble version, but thankfully Vempire gives us both—the leadership caste of the vampires is the latter, but there’s also an army of the former roaming the land, devouring everything in their path. All good so far.
The one type of vampire I don’t like is the sex vampire.
It seems like writers have been saying “did you know that vampires are like sex” for almost as long as they’ve been writing about vampires, and it got old a long time ago. At this point I’m pretty sure sex vampires outnumber non-sex vampires by a comfortable margin, and yet every time someone wheels this trope out it’s with a smirking air of “oh ho ho ho, look at how naughty and transgressive this is, when they bite someone it’s like sex did you even notice that before?”
Yeah man, I did notice, because this idea was circulating heavily in pop culture decades before I was born.
But in addition to being overplayed, having your vampires be like sex also frequently leads to stupid bullshit, and so it goes here. The circumstances of Gabriel’s first encounter with his vampiric bloodlust are completely ridiculous, and the book rarely fails to point out that the Silversaints are randy bois whenever they activate their half-vampire powers or get too thirsty. If you’re using vampires for gothic erotica then throwing in a bunch of throbbing erections whenever anyone gets vamped or thinks too hard about vamping makes sense, but that really doesn’t work for the kind of violent, bleak gothic horror that Vempire is supposedly going for. Pick a lane.
Sexuality is also occasionally used to add a sprinkling of extra edge onto the already quite edgy material present here, such as when one of the main villains vamps a thirteen-year-old girl, who he is heavily implied to be sleeping with. This is a dude who, it’s already been established, depopulates entire towns single-handedly; he didn’t need to be banging a minor to make me think he’s evil, I already got that loud and clear. If anything, the book could have done with dialling it back a bit on how cartoonishly evil the vampires are.
So those are my pre-spoiler thoughts on Vempire. It is a very stupid book, but its stupidity is a big part of the reason why it’s so entertaining. If you’re just looking for a turn-your-brain-off fantasy romp in an absurd gothic setting, and you don’t mind some grimdark material, then it’s a real page-turner. Just don’t go in expecting anything groundbreaking or intellectual.
Now, to explain why I have zero interest in reading either of the sequels despite quite enjoying this first installment, I have to get all the way into spoilers. Here’s some spoiler space, scroll down for the rest of the post.
Oh also, putting this here just to make sure people who skip the spoilers see it: one of the false legends attributed to Gabriel is that he had sex with a famously unsexable fairy queen. If this is Jay Kristoff taking the piss out of Patrick Rothfuss, as I suspect it might be, then that’s very funny.
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Welcome back.
As mentioned, one of the layers of the story involves a post-hero drunken Gabriel joining a D&D party in order to find the Grail which, according to legend, may be able to end Daysdeath. Specifically, they’re escorting a mysterious fourteen-year-old boy named Dior, who supposedly knows the Grail’s location. So off they go, Dior and Gabriel calling each other whore-cocks every second paragraph, because again, this book is really stupid.
Then some shit happens and Gabriel ends up having to take Dior the rest of the way alone. Also, it turns out that Dior doesn’t know the location of the Grail, he is the Grail, on account of being a blood descendant of the Redeemer (fantasy Jesus). Also also, he’s actually a sixteen year old girl disguised as a fourteen year old boy. This last fact is critically important, because when Gabriel realises that Dior is a girl he feels compelled to escort her the entire way to the Silversaint’s abbey instead of parting ways with her at a specified point so he can go off on his revenge quest, as he originally planned. Because his daughter was killed by vampires, you see, and now Dior is his replacement daughter.
When I saw all of this, I sat up and was like “Hey this is kind of like The Last of Us.”
Then I got to the part where Gabriel tries to fob Dior off onto someone else and she gets mad at him, then the part where they’re riding a horse and arguing over what to name it, and I was like “Wait this a lot like The Last of Us, down to replicating specific scenes and story beats.”
At this point I said to myself, “based purely on this observation, I bet I can predict exactly how this book is going to end.”
A few hundred pages later and yep, I was correct. Just to compare the two endings, for anyone who hasn’t experienced one or either of them:
The Last of Us: Joel must take Ellie, who is immune to the cordyceps infection and thus the key to synthesizing a vaccine to the zombie plague destroying humanity, to a secret lab. On the way he bonds with her because she reminds him of the dead daughter he failed to protect. Once at the lab, it turns out that Ellie’s brain needs to be dissected to create the vaccine, so Joel goes on a violent rampage, saving Ellie but potentially dooming humanity.
Vempire: Gabriel must take Dior, who is a descendant of the Redeemer and thus the key to a ritual that will end Daysdeath and stop the zombie plague destroying humanity, to the Silversaints’ abbey. On the way he bonds with her because she reminds him of the dead daughter he failed to protect. Once at the abbey, it turns out that Dior needs to be sacrificed to conduct the ritual, so Gabriel goes on a violent rampage, saving Dior but potentially dooming humanity.
There’s a reason I’m focusing so much on the two endings, specifically. “Adult and teen journey through a post-apocalyptic world” isn’t a concept that Naughty Dog invented in 2013 when they released The Last of Us; arguably Cormac McCarthy did the definitive version of that idea with The Road, a book that Naughty Dog have stated they were influenced by, and which came out all the way back in 2006. The bit where Gabriel tries to pass Dior off to someone else is in line with his character as it exists at that point in the story. I’m even willing to give Jay Kristoff credit for independently coming up with the horse scene; if you wanted to write a cute interaction to show that Gabriel and Dior are bonding with each other, it’s low-hanging fruit.
But the ending of The Last of Us is the scene in that game, the only part of the story that really felt unique and original and not like it was just copying standard Hollywood action-adventure tropes. It’s the one part of the game that everyone talks about, the lynchpin that holds the entire story together and which single-handedly propels the action of the sequel. Maybe I’d believe that someone else happened to come up with the exact same idea on their own if that was the only similarity…but combined with all the other shit I just described? There’s no way that’s a coincidence.
Now, do I actually care that Jay Kristoff ripped off a game that made hundreds of millions of dollars and was published by a huge billion-dollar megacorporation? No, not really. I mean I guess it’s kind of disrespectful to whoever came up with that ending, specifically, but we’re not talking about someone stealing from a struggling independent artist here, Neil Druckmann and co already made their money with The Last of Us (using abusive labour practices cough cough).
No, the problem is that this pretty much ruins the climax and ending of the book, because Jay Kristoff took the ending of The Last of Us and fucked it up.
Look at those two paragraphs I wrote comparing the game and Vempire. That paragraph describes the entirety of The Last of Us’ plot, from beginning to end. By contrast, the Vempire paragraph is describing maybe a third of Vempire’s plot, at most. Dior doesn’t even enter the story until page 126; you don’t find out she’s the Grail until page 336, and you don’t find out she’s a girl until page 400. And finally, the “plot twist” that Gabriel’s daughter is dead is saved for page six hundred and fifty-three, although I have no fucking idea why. (Keep in mind, there’s large chunks in between these pages where the book either cuts back to the framing story or switches to the younger-Gabriel plotline, which doesn’t feature Dior at all). Gabriel and Dior don’t take on their “Joel and Ellie” roles until well over halfway through the book, even though it’s those roles that completely dictate the climax and end of the story.
By contrast, The Last of Us starts with Joel’s daughter dying, then he meets Ellie shortly after the time-skip to the present day, and then they’re together for the entire rest of the game up until the ending. The decision Joel makes at the end of the story feels like it was inevitable as soon as we saw his daughter dying in the prologue, so when he makes it, we don’t question it for a second. Of course that’s what he’d do. But Gabriel doesn’t have that well of characterisation to draw on; we don’t even find out what his primary motivation is until near the end of the book, in order to keep it in reserve as a pointless twist that any remotely genre-savvy reader will have figured out hundreds of pages ago.
Things get even shakier when you contrast the circumstances surrounding both decisions. Part of the debate that’s unfolded around Joel’s decision in The Last of Us is the question of whether a vaccine would actually have helped much; by the time the game takes place, the cordyceps fungus has done most of the damage it’s capable of doing, and there are people—including Joel’s own brother—who are making a real go of building safe, sustainable communities out of the ruins. I don’t think any of this actually factors into Joel’s decision, but looking at the situation as an audience member reacting to the story from the outside, it helps to put his actions into context.
The situation in Vempire is much more precarious; when the Silversaints try to sacrifice Dior, the war is teetering on the brink of turning decisively in the vampire’s favour, an outcome that will definitely result in humanity’s near-total extinction. The book really drives home how absolutely fucked everything is and how horrific the consequences will be if the vampires win the war, something that ending Daysdeath will 100% instantly prevent from happening. The only real question mark is whether the ritual would actually have worked, but this is a setting where faith-based magic is a verified fact, so that shouldn’t be something that makes Gabriel hesitate (and indeed, it doesn’t).
It’s also worth looking at the specifics of the climactic rampages. Joel in The Last of Us guns down a bunch of resistance fighters who he has absolutely no loyalty towards, then kills a woman who he seems to have had, at best, a distant professional acquaintance with. Gabriel wipes out (I think—I’m not entirely sure if it’s meant to be all of them or just the ones who happened to be at the Abbey) an order he had previously pledged his life to, including his former master who trained him in the ways of combat and who had been a father figure to him, and his teenage best friend, the one remaining link to the happy life with his wife and family that he’s desperately trying to hold onto. Granted, he had been expelled from the Silversaints and had parted ways with his master under seriously acrimonious circumstances, but even still: this is basically his former family, and he kills them all in cold blood to save a girl he’s known a few months.
Now, I’m not saying the book should have ended with Gabriel letting the Silversaints sacrifice Dior and win the vampire war, obviously. That would be ludicrous. What I’m saying is that if the book was going to end this way, then that ending needed far more textual support than it got. The entire story leading up to it should have been about Gabriel bonding with Dior and struggling against the loss of his wife and daughter, so that when he makes that fateful climactic decision, it feels like the inevitable destination that the arc of the narrative was always leading to. Instead it feels contrived, as though the ending is a black hole artificially bending the story towards itself.
I have a pretty strong suspicion that the two different strands of the plot—young-Gabriel training to be a Silversaint and drunk-Gabriel saving Dior—were originally meant to be seperate novels, which would go a long way towards explaining all of this. As it stands here, the young-Gabriel plotline ends well before the end of the book itself and really feels like it’s wrapping up the way you’d expect the first instalment of a multi-part series to do…but then we cut back to the framing story and the book just keeps going.
If these two stories were their own seperate books then the relationship between Gabriel and Dior could have been expanded greatly, or at the very least, it could have been told straight through from start to finish, without getting interrupted by the other storyline. Either of these approaches could have made the ending feel more organic.