Title: Empire of the Dawn
Author: Jay Kristoff
Publication Date: November 4, 2025 by St. Martin's Press
Genres: Horror
Protagonist Gender: Various
"Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. It has been 66 days since my last review."
Or, if I can borrow a phrase from Gabriel de León, "Fuck my face, but it's been a while."
The last two months have been shit. Absolute and utter shit. I won't get into details, but I've been exhausted, overwhelmed, and really stressed. That said, things are looking better. Family members are on the mend, my mother has moved from hospital to a respite home, I seem to have slipped the chopping block at the office, and my spouse is starting a new job tomorrow.
I have not done a great deal of reading lately, both due to a lack of time and a lack of focus, but Jay Kristoff's Empire of the Dawn has been the one book into which I could consistently escape for an hour or two in the rare evening when I wasn't juggling the chaos. Not only was I entertained, but I was emotionally invested in the fates of Gabriel, Dior, and all who surrounded them. Hell, I even suffered alongside them after holding that massive hardcover tome aloft gave me a pinched nerve, leading to my spouse's diagnosis of bookcitis.
And that's why it pains me so much to write this review.
For the first 734 pages, this was a near 5-star read. It was bloody, action-packed, mythic, and heartbreaking - nay, heart-wrenching! There was one death in particular, 525 pages into the story, that filled me with such sorrow and fury that I threw the book down in rage and had to explain to my spouse who it was that I was cursing so loudly as we lay in bed. And then there came a twist on page 735 that tore the book asunder, a brilliant deception that I applauded. It was as perfect as it was unexpected, and it shifted the entire mood of the story.
But then, over the remaining 30 pages, that twist was allowed to unravel so much, to undo so many tragedies and sacrifices, to rob so many moments of their emotional weight that I felt cheated. More than that, I felt robbed, deceived, and betrayed. Kristoff could have run forward with that deception, and the book would have had the ending it deserved. By undermining all that we'd gone through together, undoing so much of what made the book mean something, he rendered it meaningless.
Empire of the Dawn was mostly great, but that betrayal of the reader's investment is hard to swallow.
Rating: ♀ ♀ ♀
My sincere thanks to the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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