JAY KRISTOFF

MOST NOVELISTS HAVE AT LEAST ONE book in a drawer that represents an early effort, a text that will never be offered up to a wider readership. In the case of Jay Kristoff, this book was a tale of bloodsuckers he wrote in 2008. “It was right at the tail end of Twilight hysteria,” he says, “so you basically couldn’t sell a vampire book for love nor money.” Fast-forward 13 years and things are rather different. Not only have we capricious readers forgotten how bored we were of vampire stories back then, but Kristoff is now a bestselling writer, well placed to serve up a new undead trilogy, which begins with Empire Of The Vampire. This first volume is an epic tale, drenched in blood, gore and high gothic flourishes.

It’s a novel the younger Kristoff couldn’t have written, yet a “tiny sliver” of his earlier book survives in Empire’s world- building, the idea that “vampires can’t choose who they turn”. Forget the romantic idea of draining someone in order to spend eternity with them.

“There is a small chance that they will be reanimated as a vampire, but you have no control over when that will happen,” he explains. “So it could be the person that you kill sits up 30 seconds later, and they’re young and beautiful forever, preserved in the state in which they died. It could be that they wake up seven or eight days later, after they’ve gone through a decomposition process, so their brains have turned to mush and their bodies are decomposed.”

DAYLIGHT SLAYINGS

In Kristoff’s imagined universe, these “mindless vampires” start to increase in number because the sun has faded in intensity. Vampires are no longer just creatures of the night – they have the opportunity to terrify humanity’s days too. “I grew up on stories like Salem’s Lot, Dracula and Interview With The Vampire, and vampires that are monstrous, amoral,” he says. “There’s a definite logic to that. If you’re a creature who kills other human beings for food every night, you’re eventually going to stop seeing them as people and start seeing them the same way you or I view the steak that we’re about to eat.”

The vampires don’t have things all their own way. Empire’s narrator is Gabriel de León, a half-vampire “silversaint”, taken away from his nearest and dearest to become a member of a holy brotherhood that fights “coldbloods”, whom we meet when he’s forced to tell his story after being captured. His “found family” narrative as he looks back prevents the story getting too bleak. Even by Kristoff’s standards, this anti-hero has things tough. “I don’t think I’ve tortured anyone quite as much as I tortured him,” he says.

There will be blood… Meet the Aussie author of a new vampire trilogy

AD EDUCATION

Kristoff’s writing career began in earnest with 2012’s Stormdancer, a Japanese-tinged steampunk fantasy. But his creative life truly began in the commercial arena, in advertising. “It’s fine when you’re young,” he says of his former life. “It’s long hours and weekends, it’s pretty high pressure, high reward. And it was fun for a lot of years, but I’m glad that I don’t do it any more.”

He’s not remotely sniffy about this first career though, seeing it as “a really good grounding” in storytelling, a way of learning not to be too precious and “how to let bad ideas go so you can let the good ideas in”. Kristoff wrote that first, unpublished, novel in secret while still working in advertising, not even telling his wife.

As a child, he says, he was “a nerdy kid” who “hung out with the other nerds”. He was captivated by The Hobbit and played Dungeons & Dragons – another formative lesson in storytelling. “You’re sitting in someone’s basement, rolling dice around and killing dragons, but you’re also telling a story together,” he says.

So it’s perhaps no coincidence that Kristoff has been a successful co-writer, working with fellow Melbourne-based writer Amie Kaufman on YA sequences The Illuminae Files and The Aurora Cycle. As for his solo work, Kristoff’s career took off with fantasy trilogy The Nevernight Chronicle, but it was a slow build. In 2016, he showed up at the Bookexpo America trade fair to push his YA work. “I told my adult publishers that I was going to be in town: ‘Should we do anything to promote the book?’ and they gave me a box with 10 advance reader copies…”

From this slow start, the buzz around the books built slowly, organically, until they became bestsellers. “A passionate publisher can give you a push,” Kristoff says. “They can spend some money and make it look like the book is the next big thing, but that only flies you so far.” To go further, you need passionate readers, which Kristoff has. “And I’m incredibly grateful to them.”

Empire Of The Vampire is published by Harper Voyager on 7 September.

I don’t think I’ve tortured anyone quite as much as I tortured Gabriel de León