Interview with the Vampire and The Da Vinci Code had drunken sex in the bathroom of a seedy bar. Nine months later they had a baby. And they named it...Interview with the Vampire and The Da Vinci Code had drunken sex in the bathroom of a seedy bar. Nine months later they had a baby. And they named it...Empire of the Vampire. Use a condom, kids.
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The truth is that I almost didn't finish this one. Why? Excessively wordy. <--if I had to sum up my reasons quickly. So if you like lush, descriptive prose? Sink in, this will hit you right in the sweet spot. If you find it frustrating when an author takes a tedious amount of fruity words to describe every goddamn thing? Don't struggle, the quicksand will only drag you down faster.
Now, in case you couldn't tell, I like to get the action rolling and not hear about every little fucking pebble in the road on the way there. SO, NO. THIS IS NOT A FAST-PACED THRILL RIDE.
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This was a 27 plus hour audiobook. And to be frank, there didn't seem to be 27 hours worth of plot happening. The first 10 hours of the audiobook could have easily been condensed into 3 or 4 without missing anything vital. Fuck, I don't know how Kristoff managed to waste that much page time, tbh.
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Another major downside to the storytelling for me was the time jumps. Now, done correctly? It can really whet your appetite for more when the narrator goes forward and backward because you know at some point the lines are going to intersect and you will find out how you got to wherever it is the story started. In this case, the story opens with our hero in prison. But instead of execution, he finds that his jailer demands he tell his life story. He then proceeds to hop back and forth between his very beginnings as a child and then as a young vampire hunter, to the most recent part of his life as a 30-something man that somehow lost the Holy Grail.
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Cool, cool, cool. Except for the part where the story was too plodding. whomp, whomp For the majority of the book, I wasn't interested enough in what was happening during either time period to care that he had stopped one story to begin another. Again. Thankfully, the vampire who was interviewing him would always give a helpful little recap now, you said you were doing such-and-such with so-and-so because I sure as shit couldn't have remembered it otherwise.
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But. I sensed that there might be something interesting under all the layers of nonsense. And there was! Around the 60% mark, my ears started to perk up. And the last 3rd of the book got hold of me in a way the beginning did not.
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I admit it. I'm invested now. I want to see what happens. I'm in. So what happened to change my mind? Well, if I had to wade through 27 hours of it to get to the good part, why should you get a pass? Yeah, that's right, I'm salty.
Recommended for anyone with the balls enough to grind past the boring bits....more
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