There's some graphic sex but nothing I'd clutch pearls over but a lot of gore, swearing, and chockablock with religious idealization (it's technically a fictional religion but obviously Christianity of the most zealous kind). You don't learn Gabe's real motivations for the latter events of the story until 700 pages in and then it becomes a bit of a sob fest with it ending abruptly when the sun comes up and a good chunk of the story left untold. I really liked Gabriel's snark and that he was a pretty multi-dimensional character, but that can't be said for the rest of this very swollen cast. The vampire traits stick to the most common tropes (silver, sunlight, how to make more, etc.) but it's made unique with terminology, ancestry, and the half-blood (what become Silversaints) race. It was just so long - only Outlander and Harry Potter books I've read are longer - and I definitely felt like the editors could have chopped it up a bit more. Gabriel is a stereotypical male protagonist: lost faith due to brutal murder of wife and child, self-destructive, and gains some faith back through a younger person who shows he that there is some meaning left in life. make the sign of the 'wheel') there's a religious inquisition male-dominated heirarchy there's a female-only order that serves the church and the 'Silversaints', clearly in a subservient role.The gender roles are traditional: the 'palebloods' (vampire father, human mother) are all male women can fight, but mostly don't appear to the female-only religious order serves to pray, heal and tattoo the warrior Silversaints, but holds little power.

The little interjections into the story itself, by Gabriel or his vampire captor, was a nice touch, I thought.*** SPOILERS ***The religion is basically Catholic: instead of a cross, there's a wheel the protagonist wonders why the symbol of torture is used as a sign of faith (i.e. It wasn't entirely linear, which I thought was well done under the guise of Gabriel refusing to tell certain parts of his life story in sequence. I found the male protagonist to be interesting, though he is a literary stereotype (see more details for all points under SPOILERS).I found the latter half of the book a bit tedious, as it seemed just one awful, violent, barely-survived-that episode after another.That all said, I liked that the story often switched between the now - Gabriel telling his vampire captor his life story - and the story itself. The gender roles also don't deviate from the traditional - men fight, women heal. I forced myself to finish out of sheer bloody-mindedness rather than real desire.The religious aspects are, for the most part, Catholicism with a few inconsequential changes.

Empire of the vampire jay kristoff