The blurb sounded cool. Nation of vampires with complex government and functional society. Nice!
Wrong. Neither the strengths nor weaknesses of the vampires ever matter. They could be Humans, Elves, or miniature giant space hamsters and the story wouldn’t change. They’re vampires because the author thought it would be cool for them to be vampires but then they did NOTHING with them.
But that doesn’t matter because the vampires are also largely irrelevant. The vampire protagonist is basically the POV character that mostly just follows around a group of impossibly skilled and basically invincible other protagonists while they do things that don’t matter. I listened to all of the first book and most of the second today but I honestly don’t even remember the point of the first book because it was largely irrelevant.
On top of that, what little plot IS present is repeatedly interrupted by completely irrelevant “interludes” where we get backstory about the protagonists whose only purpose seems to be to make self-referential in-jokes that are largely the author’s attempt to replicate Pratchett’s style, without any of Pratchett’s actual ability to be funny.
If I didn’t get this for free as part of amazon’s “Plus Catalogue”, I’d demand a refund.
The narrator was great and, frankly, is the only reason I made it as far into the book as I did but even an amazing narrator can only carry a boring story so far.