nevernight – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

It should be illegal for one guy to be this good.

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 When I finished reading Nevernight the Empire of the Vampire series was two books in, with the third yet unpublished.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.

Okay: the first half of this post is not going to be the review. Here’s the tl;dr: this series is easily the best thing I’ve read this year. The first half of this post is going to be about me being a dumbass. It’s related to these books! But it’s not a book review, and I just wanted to make it clear that I know what I’m putting you through. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to, and I’ll put in a divider. But go read these regardless.

Anyway. If you pay attention to my Unread Shelf series, you’ll know that this book has been sitting on my shelf for a while:

And yet, that book was pretty clearly not in my Monthly Reads pile a couple of days ago– and while I didn’t show the front covers, you’d be correct if you assumed that the copies of the trilogy in that post matched the image at the top of this one. So what’s the deal? Did I buy a second copy of Nevernight?

Sigh. Yes.

I sat on this trilogy for a minute, and I’ve been getting into the rather unwise habit lately of ordering entire trilogies at once, or getting just a little bit into the first book and then making a call that, at least once, has bitten me in the ass. And when I went to Amazon to order Godsgrave and Darkdawn, I encountered a problem: Godsgrave wasn’t available in an edition that matched my copy of Nevernight. But there was a three-book set readily available for, as it turned out, less than it was going to cost me to go to Barnes & Noble and pick up matching copies of Vols. 2 and 3, since Amazon is so much cheaper than B&N. So I could go to B&N and — hopefully, if they were in stock — pick up 2 & 3 that matched my pre-existing copy of 1, but spend more money than it would cost to order all three in the new covers, which, to be honest, I preferred– but ordering the three-book set put me in the rather ridiculous position of owning two copies of a book I hadn’t read yet.

I chose to save money and get the prettier covers, which turned out to be the UK edition, so why Amazon was pushing them on me so hard is kind of unclear at the moment. Point is, though, I’ve got an extra copy of Nevernight floating around, so if you think this sounds up your alley, if you wanna Cashapp me the cost of postage I’ll send it to you.

I’ve already said this twice, including once in this post, but let me say it again for those of you who may have jumped past the divider: this series is the best thing I’ve read this year. I know I get book-drunk and I get super enthusiastic when I like shit; I have sat on this post long enough to have read a whole entire other book in between, and you’ll get a review of that one tomorrow, probably. Where I’m really running into trouble, though, is figuring out how to talk about what’s good about it, in part because this is very much a Not for Everyone type of series. The main character, Mia, is an unrepentant asshole with a vicious temper and a tendency to charge into shit. Jay Kristoff is not interested in letting his characters be happy. And the series is hellaciously violent. It’s not as relentlessly dark as, say, the Poppy War books were, but you’re going to get your heart ripped out on more than one occasion in this series and Mia’s solution to any given problem tends to be to try to kill it.

And Mia is very, very good at killing. Assassin main characters are becoming a cliché if they’re not there already, but this is two series in a row (the first being David Dalglish’s Vagrant Gods, which shares a fair amount of DNA with this series) where the main character’s job was basically “killer” and the author had no interest in backing off from that at all. Dalglish’s Cyrus is a political revolutionary, where Kristoff’s Mia becomes a literal priestess of the goddess of murder over the course of the first book. Both series are explicitly revenge fantasies. Nevernight features copious footnotes, mostly used for snarky worldbuilding. As a deep and abiding lover of worldbuilding, I loved them; I can imagine them getting on certain readers’ nerves.

So, yeah: the overall arc? Mia’s parents are dead and she wants to kill the men responsible. We’ve seen that before. She joins the assassins in order to get the training she needs to be able to get close to the man responsible for her father’s death, who, rather inconveniently, happens to be imperator. Also not the most unique plot line imaginable. And then the first book really doesn’t end quite the way you thought it was going to, and you literally gasp at one point, and then you kick your opinion of the series up a couple of notches, and then maybe … midway through the second book, as you’re enjoying yourself, and grooving on the cool magic/religious system Kristoff’s got set up …

… all fucking hell breaks loose, and the series never calms down after that. I have never been happier to have Book 3 of a series already on hand after finishing Book Two, as it ends with so many massive revelations and cliffhanger shit that I literally screamed at one point while reading. If I had had to wait for Kristoff to write Book Three I’d have had to find out where he lived and stalk him to get some answers. Book Three is literally insane in a way that I can’t describe without spoilers. At one point the page formatting is used to give you a subtle hint about something that’s going on. Like, I can’t tell you a single word about Book Three. I don’t want you to know anything. Just that you’re going to get knocked on your ass over and over and over again and no one is safe, ever.

And I was really glad that I’d bought the series with the covers I got, and no, I’m not explaining that either, but you’ll understand when you finish the series. Which you are going to read.

Kristoff has one completed series out there and has another where he’s two books in out of (I think) three, and that one has vampires, and I’m excited to read it anyway. I’m just going to wait until the whole thing is out and then buy all three of them, because I do not trust this man to not destroy my sanity any longer.

Go spend money, dammit.