I’d been saving Empire Of The Vampire as a final read before Halloween. It’s a long book, (721 pages / 27 hours 10 minutes) that I’d intended to spend a week with, yet here I am, setting it aside after two hours (five chapters).

Even after only two hours, I can see the book’s appeal and understand why it’s been recommended to me by people who have immersed themselves in it and come out eager for the second book.

It’s a richly imagined dark fantasy with a complex main character at its heart, a man who is part monster and all killer and yet is still humanity’s last best hope of survival. A man who is telling his life story to his enemy and doing it with a mix of regret and relish that is part taunt and part confession. It’s a story with an epic scale and it promises to be soaked in blood. The audiobook version is narrated by Damian Lynch who has a rich, dark voice that I could listen to all day,

So why am I setting it aside after having listened to less than ten per cent?

Mostly it’s because I find the style of writing so annoying that I can’t sink into the story. The language is laboured and heavy, slowing the story down. It’s overwrought and tiring to listen to.

Every page is laden with similies and metaphors and most of them are trying too hard. I keep being thrown out of the story by phrases like “Silence entered the room on slippered feet”. I find myself wondering how silence would do that and what it would sound like and whether, if it sounds like slippers walking, it’s really silence, instead of concentrating on the content of the story.

The impact of this language is amplified because most of the story is being told directly by Gabriel de León so his habits of speech dominate the narrative and are the main instrument for world-building. I don’t find his way of talking convincing. It seems like a pastiche of ‘olden-times talk’ with a dash of French to add some spice and it undermines the world-building, making me see derivative faux medieval fantasy landscapes rather than anything real.

Finally, the setting is too static to sit with for hours on end. We have our hero, imprisoned in a dingy room in a castle that isn’t a dungeon but isn’t designed for comfort, narrating his story to his enemy, a vampire whose main role seems to be to present a civilised front that contrasts with our heroes brutishness and occasionally to ask questions to move the story along while taking notes and producing impressive sketches of Gabriel. It’s a fine place to start but not a place to stay in for twenty-seven hours.

The setup also means that Gabriel’s story, even though it’s relentlessly embellished by similies, lacks immediacy. It’s a campfire story rather than an immersive experience.

Maybe it will get better. Maybe I’ll be missing out. I’ll take that risk. I’m moving on to something else.