26. Empire of the Vampire (Book 1)

By Jay Kristoff (800 pp, ebook)

I was in the mood for a big fat vampire book and I got one. This is set in a world where the sunrise has disappeared and if people don't have enough problems staying alive, there are also vampires. It's maybe like 1500s Europe (?) Our hero, Gabriel, a silversaint which is a powerful vampire killer, is in prison and telling this story to a vampire historian. There are overlapping timelines and found family, love story, super violent actiony parts where lots of people die. I enjoyed it but it became a repetitive beat for me that the characters had to do something almost impossible, and then everything went wrong and there was lots of gruesome fighting and then a brief reprieve to pull the remaining characters together and then do it again. Definite recommend for people who like epic dark vampire stories.