Empire of the Vampire

Empire of the Vampire is an illustrated horror-fantasy novel by the Australian writer Jay Kristoff, published in 2021.

Gabriel de Leon's account begins with his childhood in a world where the failure of the sun, called Daysdeath, changed everything, and it includes the ordinary nightmare of the setting: his sister and her friend disappear into the woods and come back days later as the feral kind of vampire that revives after death. His own transformation, his rescue by the monastic order of vampire hunters, the discovery about his father and the years of training and failure that followed are all narrated to a scribe who has been ordered to record them, which gives the book a frame that allows it to move between the present of the prison and the past of the story. Kristoff wrote it for adult readers after his earlier young adult series, and he uses the machinery of a fantasy epic, including a divided church, a dying empire and an order with rules about who is permitted to carry a sword, to tell a story whose central subject is what a person will believe in order to keep fighting.