Empire of the Vampire is an amazing book and I highly recommend it. It has a standard dark fantasy medieval setting; castles, swords, horses, that sort of thing. But the world-building is phenomenal. And the author does a great job of making the vampires absolute monsters while still being sensual/sexual. So lots of violence and lots of sex here.

The story is about the last vampire hunter. He’s been captured by the Vampire Empress and is forced to tell his life story to a vampire historian as a way of documenting how vampire hunters thought, behaved, and were trained… before they go extinct. So this novel uses the literary device of someone in their later years telling the story of their life and interjecting little commentary along the way about how dumb/naive they were. So I guess similar to Name of the Wind or the Suneater series, if you’ve read those.

And let me get this non-spoiler out of the way. I’m calling it a non-spoiler because it’s something that doesn’t happen in this book. While the whole novel is about a captured vampire hunter telling his life story from a vampire prison, he does not escape in this book. It’s possible he’ll escape in a later book, but it doesn’t happen here. You’ll be happier reading this book if you aren’t constantly looking at how many pages are left and wondering when he’ll finally break free.

Anyway, in this world, vampires have always existed in the shadows. Some event occurs (it’s not explained how) which causes the sun to be blacked out. They refer to this event as Daysdeath. After Daysdeath, the vampires are free to roam the earth during day or night. And they take over. When the novel starts, there are 4 main vampire houses. They’ve each taken over a portion of the continent and are now at the point where they’re attacking each other to obtain more land. All vampires have the same basic abilities but each house has a specialty. For example, one house might be able to control animals while another house has even more excessive strength than your average super-strong vampire. So the vampire hunters have to plan accordingly depending on which house they’re attacking. In this world, the last vampire hunter is trying to find how Daysdeath occurred and how to reverse it and bring back the sun.

There’s a second book in the series called Empire of the Damned and a third book is currently being written. I’m pretty sure this third book will be the final one in the trilogy:

Personally, I enjoyed book 2 more than book 1 simply because book 2 is more chronological. In the first book, the main character would tell a story about when he was a badass in battle, then go back to talking about his childhood. Then there will be another story about him being a badass, then go back to describing his training. The childhood and training parts are pretty slow, so I understand the need to insert little battles to keep people interested. And the childhood and training parts are important to the story so I’m glad they were included. But I liked how by book 2 we’ve got all the backstory we need and can just plow forward with the life story. The story continues to be great and I’m eagerly awaiting the next book.

I guess I should add a link, Empire of the Vampire.