I made multiple attempts to acquire this book through physical retail channels– I’m not sure why, but I really wanted to buy it in person– before noticing it was like 60% off or something like that on Amazon and giving up and ordering it, and it shows up with that … thing on the spine. I’m genuinely considering returning it and just reading it on my Kindle, because that’s going to bother me every single time I look at the book for the rest of time.
Maybe I’ll go to Half Price Books tomorrow and see if they have an earlier edition.
This will be brief, as it’s been a stressful day; we had most of the rest of the work done on the bathroom (there are, sadly, still a couple of tasks to finish) and the guys were both an hour and a half late and then took much longer than they anticipated, which means I’ve spent the entire day waiting, and I’m currently chewing my arms off and climbing the walls at the same time.
The Standard Malcolm X Disclaimer: Malcolm is one of my favorite Americans; I nearly named my son after him (I had my wife talked into it and everything, and then we mutually decided to name him after his grandfather instead) and I have most of a shelf of books about him. “This book is about Malcolm X” means that I’m going to read it and unless it is tremendously poorly written, I’m going to enjoy it. It’s kinda baked in from the jump. And this book is certainly not poorly written.
Peter Goldman’s book was the first major biography of Malcolm X, coming out in 1973, with the edition I read dated 1979. I’m honestly surprised I’d never encountered it before, but I read The Afterlife of Malcolm X back in February and it got referenced enough times that I felt compelled as an amateur Malcolm scholar to pick it up.
And it’s a surprisingly solid biography, especially when one considers that it was written by a white guy in the early 1970s. Goldman appears to have had a good relationship with Malcolm and while the book isn’t as heavily footnoted as I might have liked, I didn’t encounter anything that smacked of shoddy historiography. He focuses heavily on the last year of Malcolm’s life, and then — and this is what made me decide to go ahead and write about it — also spends about a fifth of the book talking about the trial of the three men who were eventually convicted and sentenced for the assassination. Now, Afterlife covers that material as well, but that book is more interested in Malcolm as a cultural icon and I don’t think one book substitutes for another. The real interesting bit of the book is the 1979 addendum at the end, where Goldman says that he no longer believes two of the men convicted for the killing had anything to do with it.
I can’t really issue a blanket recommendation for this book, not because it’s bad but because it’s 2026 and there has been a ton written about Malcolm X in the years since he was killed. If you’re only going to read one book about him, you should read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book every single American should read anyway. If you want to read a biography, specifically, I’d recommend Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life Of Reinvention or Les and Tamara Payne’s The Dead are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X. If you already read those books and you haven’t read this one? Definitely give it a read.
I finished another really good book today— maybe you can use context clues to figure out what it was!– but I feel like I’ve maybe used up all of my holy shit this was good you have to go read it now reviews for July? Or maybe that’s not a thing, or maybe I ought to just review the two books I DNFed in between this one and There Is No Antimemetics Division. Y’know, to combat the idea that all I do is slobber all over every book I read. I dunno. Are my book reviews too positive? Maybe I’m not trustworthy anymore.
I will say that July has been weird in that it’s featured both more amazingly good books and more DNFs than a typical month does.
Anyway, what else happened today? I spent part of my afternoon clearing out my Literal Physical Inbox, better known as the wire racks on my desk that I dump mail and paperwork into when it is too important to throw away and yet not quite important enough for me to file away immediately. Getting this done was a goal over Winter Break that didn’t happen, and then a goal over Spring Break that didn’t happen, and I swore to myself that I wasn’t getting through July without taking care of it.
I found stuff dated 2022, by the way.
Along the way I uncovered a ton of professional growth paperwork for my license renewal, which isn’t a critical necessity yet– my teaching license doesn’t expire until July of 2028, which means that technically it’s good through the end of the 2028-29 school year, but I figured I’d get a jump on getting the paperwork filed.
About half an hour ago I told my wife I was going to worry about getting it done tomorrow, expecting it to take the whole morning, and then I logged into the license renewal site just to see what I was getting myself into … and I’m done with the paperwork already. It took less than fifteen minutes. I have to wait for them to approve everything, which shouldn’t take more than a couple of days, and then I need to get my CPR certification up to date, and I think after that I can officially apply for my renewal, so in theory this might be done before the school year starts. Tomorrow morning I’ll find a CPR recertification class, which will probably take longer than uploading my paperwork did.
That will square up my teaching license through 2038, a year so far into the future as to be meaningless, and it might be the last time I have to renew my license, as I’ll turn 62 in 2038 and you best believe I’ll be retiring as soon as possible, even assuming that I make it through twelve more fucking years of teaching. That, all by itself, feels completely crazy. Not as crazy as the idea that if I don’t retire in 2038, I’d have to renew through 2048. That year’s not even going to happen. Let’s be real.
I liked this book so much, I’m willing to forgive the author for wanting me to call him QNTM. I don’t know why, but I have a weird visceral reaction to authors using their Internet handles on their books. It’s made even weirder when you remember that “Luther Siler” is a pen name. I don’t know a single thing about QNTM other than that he wrote this book (and, I guess, that he’s a he, judging from his author picture) but if he’s going to keep writing books this good I’ll call him whatever the hell he wants.
This is one of the most original books I’ve ever read. I can imagine China Miéville writing something like it, which is not to say that Miéville has written anything like it yet. I’m not sure who or what else to compare it to. This is going to be a fairly short review, first because I don’t want to indulge in any spoilers, and second because beyond describing the premise, I’m really not sure how the hell to talk about this book. So I’m going to give you the basics, and I’m already telling you you need to read this if you’ve ever enjoyed science fiction that was smarter than you were, and that is going to have to be enough.
The main character of the book is Marie Quinn, who is in charge of the Antimemetics Division of something called the Unknown Organization. Her division is responsible for tracking, categorizing and occasionally keeping captive entities and objects that have the property of erasing themselves from memory. That’s what an antimeme is; it’s something that you view or interact with or occasionally get messily killed by and the very moment you’re not interacting with it you forget it exists. Some can erase specific kinds of memories (the book is generally not funny, but one entity that feeds on the very specific memory of knowing how to ride a bike has a fe pages dedicated to it) and some have the capability of also erasing notes, videos and recordings that reference their existence as well.
So, given that, and given that the potential threat these types of entities pose to civilization should be immediately clear, let me ask you two questions:
How do you fight against these things, if you forget they exist the moment you turn away from them?
How the hell do you write a book about fighting against something like that?
This is a short book; at under 300 pages it can be read in a day easily, and somehow, despite the complexity of the premise, it’s impressively clearly written. You would think this would be a mess to read, and in a lesser author’s hands, it would be; I certainly couldn’t have written this book. I almost read it twice in a row, and there’s a very good chance I’m going to read it again before the month is up. It’s an incredible achievement, both as a story and as a piece of craft. I know I’ve been super positive in my reviews lately (and I have read some amazing books in 2026) but once again I need to tell you that you absolutely have to read this one. Go grab it, right now, before you forget.
I have read three of Jay Kristoff’s books prior to this series. I read his Nevernight series back-to-back-to-back and it ended up being my favorite thing I read that year. When I finished reading Nevernight the Empire of the Vampire series was two books in, with the third yet unpublished. The third book, Empire of the Dawn, came out in November of 2025, at which point I bought all three of them, and … they sat on the shelf. Because I was a hundred miles behind on my reading, and all three of these books are 700+ pages, and despite how amazing Nevernight was, this series had a big disadvantage: It was about vampires.
I am so, so, so tired of vampires.
So anyway, I started Empire of the Vampire on July 6 and finished Empire of the Dawn this morning, July 15, so I read all 2200+ pages of this series in nine days.
It’s fucking amazing. It’s about vampires and it’s amazing. That shit shouldn’t even be possible.
Now, I’m not certain I’m willing to put this above Nevernight just yet. I really need to think about the ending for a while, and I thought about delaying this post for a few days while I worked through my feelings about it. Let me give a general idea why without getting too deep into spoilers: this book is mostly framed as one character telling his life story to someone who is holding him captive. Eventually a second character does some narration as well, and from time to time they break away from the narrative style to a more standard third-person omniscient perspective taking place in the “now” of the book. And it occurred to me partway through book one that we had no real reason to believe that everything he was telling us was true. And that, in fact, an unreliable narrator would fit in perfectly with what was going on in the story. This feeling got a bit stronger when the second character started telling her story and started it by calling the main character a fucking liar.
I don’t like vampires, and I don’t like unreliable narrators, and this book has vampires and unreliable narrators.
Because holy fuck are Gabriel de León and the second narrator massive Gotdamned liars. They are filthy liars. And I’m still not convinced that I like the way all of that worked out in the end.
That said:
This series has the best swearing I’ve ever seen in print. The depth and breadth of the profanity used in Empire of the Vampire should be taught in college classrooms. It’s amazing. I am literally in awe.
As a massive fan of world building, the basic setting of this world– a crumbling civilization where the fucking sun went out, more or less, twenty-six years ago– is absolutely fantastic. They call what happened to the sun the Daysdeath, and this is basically a world where you have night and dusk and it never gets any brighter than that– and that’s what has allowed the sheer number of vampires that exist in these books to exist, and also explains why the several vampire bloodlines have more or less been able to take over the world in the couple of decades since the Daysdeath happened.(*)
Jay Kristoff also writes fantastic battle and large-scale warfare scenes, which he didn’t have a lot of opportunity to use in Nevernight.
The characters and their various relationships are absolutely wonderful. The development you see in Gabriel over the course of the book is awesome, and his relationships with the other characters are constantly evolving, or at least pinioning back and forth between “trying to kill each other” and “not trying to kill each other.” There’s a character in Book One who is going to give you Draco Malfoy vibes; don’t stress, he’ll get better. Much better.
There’s also a sentient, talking sword who is slowly losing her mind over the course of the book. Yes, her. The sword is a girl.
Everyone speaks French for no reason that I can see other than that it usually doesn’t happen in fantasy novels and it adds some neat flavor.
And the use of religion. My God, the use of religion. The religion of the Empire of the Vampire books is a twisted, alternate version of Catholicism, and I am not joking when I tell you that if Jay Kristoff wrote an 800-page sourcebook of the lore and religious practices of this world I would buy it in a second and have it read in a day. Imagine a Catholicism that came from a Jesus who picked up a sword and conquered the world before being betrayed and executed on the wheel. (It’s not literally Jesus; they just call him the Redeemer, but the religion is clearly and intentionally derived from Catholicism.)
Now imagine, in a book that’s already about vampires, the Holy Grail being a major focus of the story.
It’s so so so so so so so fucking good, guys. All of it. And it’s brutal as hell, and it continues Kristoff’s fine tradition of never ever letting anything nice ever happen to his characters; his goal is to hurt them, and in hurting them, hurt you, and he’s amazingly fucking good at it.
Speaking of fucking, this is a vampire novel, so there’s a lot of that as well, and the most unrealistic thing about this series is that it begins with a fifteen-year-old boy who is incredibly enthusiastic about eating pussy. Seriously, the books cover about eighteen years of Gabriel de León’s life, and there is more cunnilingus in this series than all the other books I own put together, and I have everything Sarah J. Maas has ever written.
The second most unbelievable thing about this story is that, remember, de León is telling someone about all of this, so any time he gets laid, he’s supposed to be literally sitting in his little jail cell describing this shit to a vampire who is writing it all down verbatim in a big book. There are moments where he gets mocked for it, but it’s unavoidably a little ridiculous.
Kristoff is absolutely a top-tier talent, and the worst thing is that he hasn’t started releasing whatever he’s working on next– I’m caught up with his books, and one thing he’s definitely shown me is that he’s a huge fan of unexpected reveals and sudden gory deaths (and sudden resurrections– the book’s about vampires, after all) and massive plot twists and I cannot start his next series until it’s finished, because if I had to wait two years in between any of these books I would simply die. But he’s firmly among my favorite writers at this point, and you have to check this series out.
(*) This has had serious effects on wildlife and plant life, as you might expect, and the food chain is all busted to hell as well since agriculture has gotten massively more difficult. You know what you can grow without a whole lot of sunlight? Potatoes. Gabriel de León is so, so, so tired of potatoes, guys, although he remains a fan of vodka.
Four days after taking the night off because I was 100 pages from the end of Book One, I’m taking the night off because I am 100 pages from the end of Book Two. I think I’m going to take a little break in between two and three, but not long, and if Jay Kristoff ends this one with the same level of cliffhanger that he did the second Nevernight book, I won’t have any choice in the matter. So we’ll see.
I have, like most of you, spent most of the day playing Schrödinger’s Senators, and finally found an upside to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn every day: several of my friends and family members woke up to a text from me reading “Good morning! Lindsey Graham is dead!”. As of this moment, Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement that he is, in fact, alive, along with a still picture conspicuously featuring the sports section of a newspaper from today. I am unsatisfied; I’m willing to believe that he is alive (the notion that they literally had his corpse in a cold room waiting for, well, something never really sat well with me) but if I were a Kentuckian I would be raising pure bloody hell demanding 1) an explanation for why the fuck he’s been radio-silent for a month and 2) if not an actual press conference, at least a Zoom group interview or something. I’m not willing to go so far as to say the photo is faked, but a still photo of a (surprisingly healthy-looking) person and a written statement is not a proof of capability. I want to know if there’s still a person in there, damn it.
I’m going to try to resist the urge to read the entire series back-to-back-to-back, or maybe I’m not. But my God, has this book been phenomenal so far.
Other than the links on the right side of the page, you really don’t see much about my books around here any longer. I haven’t released anything new in six years or so, maybe longer, and most of the time I’m pretty convinced that that particular door is gonna stay closed. Part of the problem is that writing fiction, for me, has always been like pulling teeth– I can knock out any sort of nonfiction prose at length and quickly, but I would spend hours staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, and eventually the pain and the self-torture had to stop. COVID didn’t help, obviously, but it would have happened anyway, I think.
Part of the problem is Skylights. Skylights is near-future science fiction, which is always rough, no matter what, but I was stupid enough to attach certain events in Skylights to actual dates, which put the book on a timer for when bits would become Objectively Wrong, and several of those years have passed by now. In addition, the prologue of the book is explicitly tied to the main character’s recollection of the Challenger explosion. That’s not automatically a problem, not yet, but it made Gabriel the oldest character in the book, and he’s going to keep getting older until his inclusion no longer makes sense.
I have been tossing around the idea (for years now, for the record) of doing a second edition of Skylights that basically gets rid of all of the dates and adjusts the prologue so that it doesn’t automatically age my main character into his late forties or early fifties for a while now. I’ve not done it because 1) it’s kind of pointless, especially since I’ve blown up the sequel more than once already, and 2) I feel like if I’m going to bother revising Skylights, it ought to be in the context of relaunching my writing “career,” such as it is, and I’m not at all prepared to do that.
And then I hit a throwaway detail in Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger book, and bam, everything fell together. I’ve got a way for the prologue to work now, based on something that actually happened, and I can slide Gabe’s birth forward enough that by the time the book is out of date again I won’t have to worry about it. I even came up with a better reason for him to be on the trip in the first place; I was never entirely satisfied with Zub’s reasoning for bringing him on, and I think I’ve got a better idea now.
I’m not sure why I’m telling y’all this, other than another example of my habit of working through my thoughts by writing about them. I mean, I could just quietly update the text on Amazon and not worry about it; I might have to adjust the cover by a fraction of an inch somewhere or something like that, but once the writing part is done, it’s not a lot of additional work. And there are times where I miss being able to call myself an author. The problem is that authors have ideas, and I don’t have any. It’s not like figuring out how to move Skylights onto a floating timeline helped me solve the plot snarls and ridiculousnesses that multiple drafts of Sunlight kept falling into.
I should probably at least put a document together and write out some notes about how it was going to work, though, so that I can get it back later if I need it.
