Empire of the Damned by Jay Kristoff is the sequel to one of my favorite surprise finds, Empire of the Vampire. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite like the sequel as much as the first book, which also means I may less enthusiastically recommend Empire of the Vampire in the future.

Ordinarily, I tend to avoid reviewing anything I don’t want to recommend for a number of reasons. However, I can make an exception here for a two reasons. First, Kristoff is mega-successful, so I don’t feel bad publicly saying I didn’t like something he wrote. I will have zero impact on him or his sales. Second, I did really enjoy Empire of the Vampire, so I would still recommend it to certain readers as long as they know what comes next.

I have to start with why I enjoyed Empire of the Vampire. I originally was searching for a book similar to Bloodsong, Red Rising, and Battlemage, my trifecta of favorite farm boy books. Bloodsong doesn’t have a farmer, but it’s the idea of a wide-eyed youth training to become deadly and go on to do great things. This is a pretty classic fantasy story archetype, and those three books are great modern executions of exactly that.

Enter Empire of the Vampires. I’m not the biggest vampire or urban fantasy fan. You know, all that blood and brooding, nevermind the sparkling or thousand-year age gap romances. However, someone on reddit suggested Empire of the Vampire as a book similar to Bloodsong. That meant I had to give it a try.

I was pleasantly surprised. Empire of the Vampire is a farm boy book. The structure is a little different, because an older jaded warrior Gabriel is retelling his past, but the bulk of the story follows his rise from a trainee to a celebrated knight. That’s exactly what I enjoy.

The vampire elements are present, and there are a few adult elements in there, but they aren’t the focus like in a typical urban fantasy. This is really a dark medieval fantasy with vampires woven into the medium. Vampires are gritty and fresh, giving you the feel of a fresh fantasy rather than another generic vampire tale.

I loved Empire of the Vampire. Fast-forward to the sequel, Empire of the Damned. Overall, the story was fine, nothing terrible to turn me off. But it was a very different reading experience from the first book.

Empire of the Damned came off as more of a vampire book than a farm boy book or even a dark medieval fantasy. That means leaning much harder into classic vampire tropes, including more arguably gratuitous adult elements and the rest of that vampiric baggage. I don’t know if people gave feedback that the first book didn’t feel enough like a vampire book, but that was precisely the reason I liked it so much. Empire of the Damned, on the other hand, seemed like it was catering to very specific audience tastes that no longer matched mine.

Beyond those types of issues, there was the dreaded POV expansion that lots of readers of progression fantasy tend to dislike. I enjoy multi-POV stories like Cradle, but here, the original main character Gabriel makes up half or less of the POV. Empire of the Damned is split up into three sections, and only the first is told from Gabriel’s POV.

A side character and MacGuffin character from book one are turned into the main characters of book two. I enjoyed Empire of the Vampire as a farm boy story starring Gabriel, and I wasn’t as interested in the other two characters. I’ve been following Gabriel’s story, and I don’t always enjoy when the story branches off like that. Sometimes I do, but this wasn’t one of them.

I also found myself skimming through the middle of the novel. I had a similar issue here as I did with the Pariah trilogy. At a certain point, the tension and drama all feels the same. Run into monsters or bad guys. Have a generic fight. Recover and regroup. Keep going.

I’m more of a webnovel and litrpg junkie these days, which means I am accustomed to an extremely high level of magic and all sorts of ridiculous combat situations. The standard fantasy fight of grunting and swinging swords just doesn’t cut it for me after a few times, not when I’m used to people exploiting magical glitches or doing all sorts of ultra-nerdy fantasy shenanigans.

By the middle of the second book, I think the new shine of having a vampire-filled medieval fantasy world had worn off, and the story felt more normal to me. Then again, I have a short reading attention span. Your mileage may vary.

I would still recommend Empire of the Vampire for fans of farm boy books like Bloodsong, even knowing that you might not like the sequel. The first book was that much fun. Sadly, I think I may not continue the series, but my reading tastes are probably not aligned with Kristoff’s core audience.