Empire of the Dawn
Empire of the Dawn
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Jay Kristoff on Empire of the Dawn
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Monsters, faith, and a debt to Anne RiceThe trilogy’s roots go back to a library, a hidden book, and decades of accumulated love for a genre Kristoff eventually wanted to reclaim. By the time he sat down to write the first volume, he had already trunked one vampire novel, years earlier, that he knew wasn’t good enough.
There would be no EMPIRE without INTERVIEW. I probably discovered that book when I was 19. I’d loved vampires before that (I read Salem’s Lot when I was 11) but Anne’s take was transformative. She brought the Sexy along with the Horror and Tragedy. I’d wanted to write a vampire novel since I started trying to get published. My first (trunked) novel was a vampire story. But it took a lot of practice for me to get good enough to write a book like EMPIRE. I couldn’t have pulled that novel off ten years ago.
The corrective impulse behind the series was specific: Kristoff watched vampires spend decades becoming romantic leads and tortured antiheroes, and he wanted to write against that accumulated softening.
My main goal in writing the series was to make vampires evil again. They’ve been interpreted a hundred ways over the years, become brooding anti-heroes and love interests, which is all fine — the wonderful thing about them is they can be different things to different people. But I wanted to bring them back to the days when they were monsters to be feared. Evil to be fought. A cautionary tale about the price tag of Forever.
Alongside the horror-restoration project runs a second, more personal engine. Kristoff grew up Catholic, and the doubt that upbringing leaves behind is not resolved in Gabriel de León’s arc so much as dramatized across three books.
Faith is a central theme of the whole trilogy. Gabe’s struggle with the idea of a benevolent creator presiding over a world gone so horribly wrong is a constant. But nothing in this world is what it seems, and our heroes have a few rude awakenings in DAMNED. So yes, much God angst. I was raised catholic, after all.
That phrase, ‘after all,’ does a lot of work. It’s not an explanation so much as an acknowledgment that some questions don’t get answered, they just get carried.
The specific shape of Empire of the Dawn arrived during a writing retreat in Toledo, Spain, a walled medieval city with its fortifications still standing. About two weeks in, on a morning walk along the city walls, something resolved.
It was like an idea fell out of the sky. I can’t describe it any better than that. [paraphrased from audio]
He spent the next couple of days writing it out. The last half of the book then came quickly, and he read that speed as confirmation he was heading the right direction.
How he wrote it
Structure, illustration, and the hardest scenes to writeOne of the trilogy’s most deliberate structural decisions concerns Dior, the character whose fate drives the entire plot. Keeping her at a remove was a choice Kristoff made to protect her from ordinariness.
She’s this semi-mythical figure. So the less time you actually spend with her and the more time you spend with the people who knew her, the easier it is to maintain that sense of legend about her because you’re only hearing about her second hand. [paraphrased from audio]
Aaron, Gabriel’s old school rival, began in the first draft of Empire of the Vampire as a minor blond antagonist with a rough plan to resurface as an enemy in book three. When that draft hit 450,000 words and Kristoff had to cut aggressively, a separate character was removed entirely and their storyline folded into Aaron, which changed everything about who Aaron was.
All of a sudden Aaron kind of completely transformed in the narrative in terms of who he was as a person, but also the role he was going to play and the relationship that he had with Gabe. [paraphrased from audio]
By Dawn, some of the writing Kristoff is proudest of is the quiet dialogue between Gabe and Aaron, two people who know each other so well they almost don’t need to talk.
The illustrations in the Empire books are drawn in-world by Jean-François, the historian interrogating Gabriel, which means they carry narrative information rather than decoration. Kristoff was explicit about the distinction when discussing the series’ design.
I wanted readers to feel like they’re in that cell with Gabe and Jean-François. I wanted the illustrations to serve a purpose beyond pure aesthetics.
On a day-to-day level, Kristoff’s discipline is uncomplicated. He writes 2,000 words on a typical weekday whether or not he feels like it, applying the same logic to writing that he would to any other job he wanted to keep.
I treat it like a job, so I go to work every day, even if I don’t feel like writing that day... if it was any other kind of job and I didn’t show up for work when I wasn’t enthused, I’d get fired. And this is the best job I’ve ever had, so I want to treat it seriously. [paraphrased from audio]
Action sequences come fast for him, sometimes done by lunch. The slow, two-person conversations cost more and take longer, and they tend to become his favorite parts of the finished book.
What he wants us to sit with
Hope as obligation, sacrifice as the price of meaningKristoff has written dark books across eighteen novels, but he holds a firm position on what dark fiction owes its readers at the end. The question he was asked directly, for Dawn, was whether hope belongs in a book this bleak.
It’s imperative! I write dark books, but nobody wants to slog through 800 pages of hopelessness and turn the final page to discover the villain standing atop a pile of charred hero corpses, laughing maniacally. The search for the light, and the idea of holding on to hope when all seems lost is really at the core of the books.
The other side of that hope argument is what victory must cost. Kristoff uses the original Star Wars trilogy as his example: the Death Star explosion at the end of A New Hope doesn’t quite land because nobody pays anything for it.
Victory without sacrifice is meaningless. If you don’t pay something to win, then I don’t really see a lot of point. [paraphrased from audio]
The Voss, the immortal faction who dominate much of Dawn, are designed to embody what happens when time removes the last moral constraint. Immortality in this trilogy is not a gift but an erasure.
Time is a huge theme in EMPIRE — the fact that nothing is permanent, that it eats us all alive. And one of the things it eats in my immortals is their morality.
Kristoff won’t resolve the faith questions he gave Gabriel, because he hasn’t resolved them himself. The honest position, for him, is that they belong to a category of questions a writer can dramatize without settling.
I’m not an author who likes getting on soapboxes. But a lot of the questions asked in this book are ones that have been kicking around in my head most of my life.
That refusal to deliver an answer is its own kind of honesty. Gabriel’s argument with God ends where all such arguments end: not resolved, but exhausted.