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Summary
Summary
A stunning departure, a surprising and compelling return...From Anne Rice, perennial best seller, single-handed reinventor of the vampire cosmology--a new, exhilarating novel, a deepening of her vampire mythology, and a chillingly hypnotic mystery-thriller.
"What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now
contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and
again..." --from The Vampire Lestat
Rice once again summons up the irresistible spirit-world of the oldest and most powerful forces of the night, invisible beings unleashed on an unsuspecting world able to take blood from humans, in a long-awaited return to the extraordinary world of the Vampire Chronicles and the uniquely seductive Queen of the Damned ("mesmerizing" -- San Francisco Chronicle ), a long-awaited novel that picks up where The Vampire Lestat ("brilliant...its undead characters are utterly alive" -- New York Times ) left off more than a quarter of a century ago to create an extraordinary new world of spirits and forces--the characters, legend, and lore of all the Vampire Chronicles.
The novel opens with the vampire world in crisis...vampires have been proliferating out of control; burnings have commenced all over the world, huge massacres similar to those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned ...Old vampires, roused from slumber in the earth are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn vampire-mavericks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco.
As the novel moves from present-day New York and the West Coast to ancient Egypt, fourth century Carthage, 14th-century Rome, the Venice of the Renaissance, the worlds and beings of all the Vampire Chronicles-Louis de Pointe du Lac; the eternally young Armand, whose face is that of a Boticelli angel; Mekare and Maharet, Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true Child of the Millennia; along with all the other new seductive, supernatural creatures-come together in this large, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious novel to ultimately rise up and seek out who-or what-the Voice is, and to discover the secret of what it desires and why...
And, at the book's center, the seemingly absent, curiously missing hero-wanderer, the dazzling, dangerous rebel-outlaw--the great hope of the Undead, the dazzling Prince Lestat...
Author Notes
Anne Rice was born Howard Allen O'Brien on October 4, 1941 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1964 and master's degree in English and creative writing in 1972 from San Francisco State University.
She published her first short story in 1965 called October 4, 1948. Her first book, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976. It was made into a film starring Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Cruise in 1994. She wrote various series in the same genre including the rest of the Vampire Chronicles, the Mayfair Witches books, and The Wolf Gift Chronicles. Her novel, Feast of All Saints, became a Showtime mini-series in 2001. Her other works include Cry to Heaven, Servant of the Bones, and Violin.
In 1998, Rice returned to the Catholic Church and for some time only wrote for Christ or about Christ. These works include Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, and Called Out of Darkness.
Anne Rice died on December 11, 2021 at the age of 80.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Narrator Vance lends his voice to the exciting audio edition of the 11th book in Rice's Vampire Chronicles series. The Voice, a mysterious power, is compelling older vampires worldwide to annihilate their younger peers. Not since the massacre committed by Akasha, the original Queen of the Damned, have so many vampires been killed in one of Rice's novels. Through the perspective of Lestat we are reintroduced to favorite characters such as the witch twins, David, Jessie, Marius, Armand, and Louis, along with new characters-the ancient voice and Akasha's son, Seth,. Vance does a terrific job of creating unique voices for the characters. His rendition of Lestat is spot-on, portraying him with a droll French accent that perfectly captures imperial, hypnotic arrogance of the character. The general pace of the narration is slow and steady. But the story line is nonlinear, and the time frame is not clear at points in the audio edition. A Knopf hardcover. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
After exploring the plights of angels, werewolves, and even Jesus Christ himself in a string of novels, Rice (The Wolves of Midwinter, 2013) returns to the Vampire Chronicles, the series that made her famous almost four decades ago. In this new entry, the vampires are imperiled by an entity they know only as the Voice, who telepathically encourages older vampires to slay their younger counterparts. Though many vampires resist the Voice's commands, several powerful elders give in, including ancient Rhoshmandes. Infamous Lestat, who has been avoiding both his own kind and humans, is forced to come out of his self-imposed exile to unite the vampires to deal with this new threat. He's shocked to learn that a vampire scientist has used his DNA to create a human offspring named Viktor, but before Lestat can meet the young man, Viktor is abducted by Rhoshmandes at the behest of the Voice, who is determined to bend the vampires to his will. Featuring beloved characters from previous installments and spanning continents and centuries, Rice's exciting return to the Vampire Chronicles is bound to please her legions of fans. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Rice's return to her vampire series is big book news, and an author tour and initial 300,000 print run are set to meet reader enthusiasm.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"WHAT A DASHING and beautiful figure Lestat was," an elderly vampire moons at a pivotal moment in Anne Rice's PRINCE LESTAT (Knopf, $28.95), succinctly stating the novel's theme. The natty vamp Lestat de Lioncourt - decked out for this occasion, a kind of worldwide blood-drinkers summit, "in a fresh and showstopping ensemble of Ralph Lauren wool plaids and pastel linen and silk" - was present at the creation of Rice's long-running Vampire Chronicles series, which began with "Interview With the Vampire" in 1976. Brooding furiously, he dominated that book, commanding it as effortlessly as he does the attention of his fellow vampires in this latest installment. Lestat's vampirism dates from the late 18th century, but his star quality seems very much the product of the time in which Rice gave birth to him, the 1970s: "Interview With the Vampire" reads like a People magazine profile written by Ann Radcliffe. (People had begun publication just a couple of years earlier.) Although the style, mixing celebrity-worshiping gush with Gothic portentousness, is, not to put too fine a point on it, nutty, Rice wielded it with amazing self-assurance, as if it were inevitable, something that had been waiting to be discovered. That's what all pop-culture geniuses do, in their different ways. And over nearly four decades and many, many books, she has seen no reason to change it. In "Prince Lestat," the first Vampire Chronicles novel in a decade, Rice's queenly prose is unaltered. Time cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite monotony. The years have taken their toll in other respects. "Interview With the Vampire" was at least arguably horror fiction: Although Lestat and his cronies were the heroes, their depredations did still have the power to shock, in part because there was always at least one character - the interviewer - to represent the perspective of the non-undead. In the subsequent books, Rice seemed to lose interest in the human point of view, preferring instead to burrow deeper into the blood-drinkers' tenebrous world: its origins, its day-to-day (or night-to-night) problems, its tangled internal politics. By this late stage of the Vampire Chronicles, Rice has constructed such a fearsomely elaborate mythology that "Prince Lestat" requires a ton of supplementary material even to be comprehensible. The book includes an introductory recap of vampire history (called "Blood Genesis"), a glossary of Rice-specific terminology ("Blood Argot") and, at the end, a sorely needed list of dramatis personae and an "informal guide" to the previous volumes, without all of which paraphernalia the uninitiated reader would be utterly lost. What plot there is takes an agonizingly long time to rev up because there's so much back story to fill in, and even when it reaches cruising speed the narrative momentum is rather leisurely. The novel's only subject, really, is the greatness of Lestat, who sometimes narrates and is otherwise merely spoken of in hushed, awe-struck tones - even before he nobly saves the entire vampire race from extinction. Although this is a dreadful novel, it has to be said that the earnestness with which Rice continues to toil at her brand of pop sorcery has an odd, retro sort of charm, an aura redolent of the desperate, decadent silliness of the disco era. "Prince Lestat" has nothing to do with horror and even less to do with the Romantic literature Rice tries to evoke, but she and her hero are possessed of a certain louche conviction - a sense that although their time is passing, they will grit their pointy teeth and boogie on. These days, vampires are pretty scarce in horror fic- tion. For many of them, the party has moved elsewhere, to the hybrid genre known as "paranormal romance," in which impossible beings gambol to their own weird beats. (Those awful, smelly zombie arrivistes have simply ruined the horror scene.) And the glittery night world of the Vampire Chronicles doesn't have the allure it once had for readers of mainstream horror, who now seem to prefer to stay at home and worry about household maintenance, difficult children and rude ghosts. Several of these tales of middle-class domestic anxiety are out at the moment, the most interesting being Keith Donohue's THE BOY WHO DREW MONSTERS (Picador, $26), Lauren Oliver's ROOMS (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99) and Siobhan Adcock's THE BARTER (Dutton, $26.95). In Donohue's ingenious novel, Holly and Tim Keenan, living in their "dream house" on the rugged coast of Maine, notice some disturbing changes in their 10-year-old son, Jack Peter. A solitary, fearful kid even at the best of times, he has begun to suffer from terrible nightmares, dreaming of monsters who "lay a hand upon his shoulder" and "whisper in his ear as he slept." While the parents fret and bicker, strange creatures - perhaps actual monsters - start to appear, as if summoned by the boy's increasingly fevered imagination. Donohue unspools his simple story patiently, delivering jolts when necessary, but mostly concentrating on the stress generated in a family with an unhappy child. It's a modest novel, elegantly worked, with a nice chilly twist at the end. Oliver's "Rooms," which also takes place in an old house in the Northeast inhabited by a dysfunctional family, is a more ambitious but more ramshackle construction, with multiple narrators, several ghosts, an unusually busy plot and a tricky structure. Although the novel is, from time to time, pleasantly spooky, even Oliver's best scare effects don't linger long in the mind because there's so much bric-a-brac. The storytelling is jittery, cluttered, unsettling in some of the right ways and quite a few of the wrong ones. (Maybe a feng shui makeover. ...) "Rooms" has neither the shamelessness of pulp horror nor the focused intensity of a literary ghost story, in which the apparitions bring forth truths about the troubled souls of both the living and the dead. There's plenty of activity, human and otherwise, in these rooms, but the novel feels like too much house for the small ideas that rattle around in it. Adcock's novel, her first, seems initially no more than another of these cozy domestic hauntings, distinct only in its setting - suburban Texas, rather than the usual rural Northeast. The young family here consists of Bridget; her husband, Mark; and their infant daughter, Julie. Bridget is ambivalent about having given up the practice of law for motherhood; Mark works punishingly long hours as a web designer; and Julie's just a cute kid. Into this banal life steps a mighty insistent spirit, the shade of a dead woman who seems unhealthily interested in the little girl. Adcock describes the specter vividly: "The edges of her body, her head, her limbs, seem constantly to be shifting, growing enormous and grotesque and then shrinking, angling away, diminishing to an equally grotesque size, out of proportion to what her body seems to want to be. It is like watching a maddened Picasso try to struggle out of its frame." The ghost becomes a constant, vaguely threatening presence in the family's otherwise ordinary lives, and Bridget goes haywire trying to get it to go away. She doesn't know, or especially care, who the dead woman was. But the reader does, because in alternating chapters "The Barter" tells the story of another frazzled wife and mother, named Rebecca, who lived a brief, unsatisfying farm-country life in the early 20th century, before the bright suburbs claimed the land. Rebecca's tale of her ill-fated marriage is interesting, deep and sad, and it gives perspective to the doubts and minor irritations of Bridget's relationship with Mark. It's as if this house had been invaded by an unfamiliar sort of gravity, a sense that life can be heavy and consequential in ways good suburban mommies and daddies only dimly understand. In a way, this sorrowful spirit allows Adcock to make excellent sport of the culture of modern middle-class parenting. With the ghost looming, the petty concerns of the local youngmom cadre look dopier than ever to Bridget, who gradually loses patience with the conventions that rule her narrow world. We see her measuring her old, trivial anxieties against this huge new thing, this fear, as she begins to realize that what you're afraid of is part of who you are. "The Barter" is a thoughtful and surprisingly witty novel. It weighs its horrors precisely. And that's a crucial quality in this genre: Horror works best when it's about things that are actually worth being afraid of. Like Siobhan Adcock, the English writer Chaz Brenchley, who tells a bizarre coming-of-age story in his lovely short novel BEING SMALL (Per Aspera; cloth, $19.99; paper, $9.99), knows how to give some heft and gravity to the anxieties of everyday life. His narrator, 16-year-old Michael, is, like every teenager, trying to figure out who he is, but his version of that perennial problem is unique: He was born with his dead twin, whom he calls Small, inside his own body, and feels him there still. Michael and his ditsy mother live a bohemian life on the fringes of Oxford. They speak of Small as if they were describing a real person, and although Michael protests that his phantom brother "is not a metaphor, for my use or anyone's else," that is, of course, exactly what Small is: an embodiment of Michael's ambivalence about the person he is, or is not, becoming. He tries on ways of interpreting his resident alter ego: "He can be my cold and unreachable heart, the figure in my carpet, the ghost in my machine; or he can be my savior, my criterion, deus ex machina, the point of my perspective." He comes closest, perhaps, when he refers to Small as "the mote in my inward eye" because the issue, throughout, is how Michael sees himself: whether he feels he's living his own life or someone else's and, come to that, which life he would prefer. Not much of a truly horrific nature happens in "Being Small" - Brenchley's tone is quiet, contemplative - but it's intensely dramatic, in the way adolescent problems tend to be, in teenagers' inward eyes. "It might be war," Michael announces, "where only the strong survive." Brenchley makes this tooth-and-claw battle thrilling. There are also bloody, bruising conflicts in Patrick McCabe's HELLO MR. BONES AND GOODBYE MR. RAT (Quercus, $24.99), which brings together a pair of rambunctious short novels, both narrated (very unreliably) by ghosts. In the first, a demonic pedophile named Balthazar Bowen, self-slaughtered, gleefully recounts his attempt to destroy the life of the boy who, years before in Ireland, blew the whistle on his abuse. The victim, Valentine Shannon, is now, decades later, a grown man on the verge of happiness, which inspires Bowen (a.k.a. Mr. Bones, among other guises) to destroy poor Valentine's hopes for normality. It's an appalling spectacle. But McCabe, as readers of his 1992 novel "The Butcher Boy" might remember, is expert at making the darkest deeds funny, forcing us to laugh at the worst things in the world. He writes like an Irish Lenny Bruce, riffing at warp speed, swerving from one time to another and one place to another and strewing the landscape with allusions - to Coleridge, Milton, Yeats, Marc Bolan, "Goodbye Mr. Chips," "Oliver!," Betty Boop and an annoyingly memorable toothpaste jingle, among others - and somehow it all makes sense. By the end, you might feel, as Valentine does, "captive in the dread country of delusion and irrationality," but if you're not blinded by McCabe's verbal pyrotechnics you can make out where he's been going. This story is about the struggle to break free of a dire past; about the powerful forces arrayed against reason, sanity, happiness itself; about the demons that keep us locked up in old obsessions. If this sounds like an allegory of the long troubles of McCabe's native island, that's no accident, and in "Goodbye Mr. Rat" he states his case a wee bit more directly. The narrator here is a dead I.R.A. bomber named Gabriel King, who may or may not have been an informer. After his death, in America, his ashes are being carried back to Ireland by his friend Beni Banikin, a lesbian playwright who is herself a casualty of a violent history. The tone of "Goodbye Mr. Rat" is more muted and mournful than that of "Hello Mr. Bones," but McCabe's writing is no less brazenly allusive - the major points of reference here are Yeats's play "The Dreaming of the Bones," Coleridge again ("A frightful fiend doth close behind him tread"), the Band, Thin Lizzy, "Toy Story" and Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" - and Gabriel is no more to be trusted than Balthazar Bowen was. Different though they are, the novels come together when you're finished reading, creating a single vision of the horrors that crush people's souls. The stories McCabe tells have a terrible beauty. Next to them, the problems of a bunch of vampires don't amount to a hill of beans. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Guardian Review
Bloodsucking is not a free ride. The drawbacks of being a vampire extend beyond draughty castles, unsociable hours, a formal dress code and the occasional mob of torch-wielding peasants. From John Polidori's Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre (1819), Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871) to Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and beyond, ancient vampires, laden with ennui, have been forced to confront changing sexual mores and bewildering new technologies that hold the potential to destroy them. The undead in Anne Rice's latest instalment of her Vampire Chronicles, Prince Lestat, are troubled and entranced by the digital age. The once sparse vampire population has exploded and "blood drinkers with picture-capturing iPhones; satellite mobiles . . . better than telepathy" are everywhere. They have upgraded their music collections to CD, embraced flat-screen television and learned how to email, blog and broadcast via digital radio but, as many celebrities have discovered, it is hard to remain legendary in a world saturated in social media. The children of the night can no longer rely on remote chateaus, dense forests and icy reaches to conceal their presence. They might even find themselves being papped. Anne Rice's 1976 debut Interview with the Vampire introduced the mercurial Lestat de Lioncourt and his reluctant companion, the equally sexy, but rather squeamish, Louis de Pointe du Lac. These were fallible vampires, forced to explore their own ethics and to realise the necessity of death and grief. The novel demanded sympathy for the poor devils and transfused the genre with exciting new blood. Rice went on to write more than 20 books, involving crisscrossing realms and beings. Prince Lestat endeavours to bring these worlds and characters together in one volume. A glossary detailing 50-plus individuals, excluding "assorted unnamed fledglings, ghosts and spirits" is included at the end for anyone (I imagine that is everyone) who might get confused. The vampire world is under attack from "the Voice", a disturbed telepathic force, which commands mass burnings of fledgling vampires. Massacres take place across the globe. The children of the night call on the most famous vampire of all, "brat prince" Lestat, to help them unite and defeat the Voice, before it manipulates them into annihilating each other. Selfish and vain, Lestat is an unlikely saviour, but he has learnt a lot over the centuries. With the help of various ancient vampires, he becomes determined to conquer the Voice and rescue the undead. Lestat retains some of his original magnetism and the book's most successful chapters are narrated by him, but even the brat prince's superpowers cannot hinge its many plot strands and voices together. Vampires of all varieties and eras, scientists, hipsters, elders drift in and out of the action. The dead are risen, the powerful slain, the reader lost. Rice's style veers between chatty and extravagant. The occasional vamping reassures us that, unlike chaste promise-ring Twilight-teens, her vampires remain red blooded, but there is little to quicken the pulse. The Voice that plagues the vampires is neither charming nor compelling and it is hard to believe it could entrance anyone into committing genocide. Interview with the Vampire is set in the 18th century, but its troubled, sexy vampires, "half in love with easeful death", wholly in love-hate with each other, were so in tune with the 70s they almost seemed to anticipate the devastating arrival of HIV and Aids. Prince Lestat is firmly located in the 21st century, but its frequent references to contemporary technologies including cloning, offer no real insights into the modern world. "The centre cannot hold," Yeats wrote of another terrible coming. The description could be applied to Prince Lestat, a sprawling, meandering disappointment, overburdened by a cast of Busby Berkeley proportions. Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac deserve a place beside Lord Ruthven, Carmilla and Dracula in the history of vampire fiction. They are in danger, not from some mysterious telepathic force, but from their creator's determination to keep on rolling them out. The dawn approaches and it is time to go to bed. Louise Welsh's latest novel is A Lovely Way to Burn (John Murray). - Louise Welsh Caption: Captions: Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in; Interview with the Vampire The vampire world is under attack from "the Voice", a disturbed telepathic force, which commands mass burnings of fledgling vampires. Massacres take place across the globe. The children of the night call on the most famous vampire of all, "brat prince" Lestat, to help them unite and defeat the Voice, before it manipulates them into annihilating each other. Selfish and vain, Lestat is an unlikely saviour, but he has learnt a lot over the centuries. With the help of various ancient vampires, he becomes determined to conquer the Voice and rescue the undead. "The centre cannot hold," Yeats wrote of another terrible coming. The description could be applied to Prince Lestat, a sprawling, meandering disappointment, overburdened by a cast of Busby Berkeley proportions. Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac deserve a place beside Lord Ruthven, Carmilla and Dracula in the history of vampire fiction. They are in danger, not from some mysterious telepathic force, but from their creator's determination to keep on rolling them out. The dawn approaches and it is time to go to bed. - Louise Welsh.
Kirkus Review
Armand, Seth, Akasha and, of course, Lestat de Lioncourt are back with a vengeanceand, natch, they're looking to put the bite on someone. There was a time, not so long ago, when Lestat fans had reason to fear they'd seen the last of theirwell, man, maybe, depending on how you define "man." After an 11-year dry spell since Blood Canticle (2003), though, Rice has resurrected her Vampire Chronicles, picking up where one of the earlier books, The Queen of the Damned (1988), left off. A lot's happened since that time. For one thing, the vamps have plenty of new technology to play with, with Lestat himself, the rock star manqu, in love with his iPod and with that undead popster Jon Bon Jovi, "playing his songs over and over obsessively." That adulation is about the most frightening thing in Rice's latest; it's not that the novel is without its spine-tingling moments so much as that Rice has prepared the ground too well, with not just her own legacy, but also a legion of lesser imitators (Charlaine Harris, Stephenie Meyer, et al.) competing with her on the sanguinary-moments front. The latest installment finds the vamps at war with themselves, crowded on a planet with plenty of competition, indeed, but with plenty of juicy humans to nibble on: "So rich, so healthy, so filled with exotic flavors, so different from blood in the time he'd been made." Rice extends the Chronicles even farther into the past, rounding out storylines stretching into ancient Egypt, while reintroducing a large cast of familiars and adding some new characters to the mix. Suffice it to say, first, that the vamps are no longer limiting their recruitment to liberal arts majors, to the poets and singers of yore; suffice it also to say that the busy intergenerational (and inter-planes of existence) conflict that ensues screams out for at least one sequel, if not a string of them. Rice fans probably need not fear a drought of her thirst-quenching tales, then. As for this one, it's trademark Rice: talky, inconsequential, but good old-fashioned fanged fun. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. After the release of the last "Vampire Chronicles" novel (2003's Blood Canticle), Rice returns to her popular series, with Lestat back with all of his cohorts and a major change coming in the hierarchy of those in the blood. Vampires all over the world are waging war against one another at the bidding of a mysterious voice. Those in the blood are looking for leadership in the oldest of the blood drinkers, and in the most famous vampire, Lestat. He barely protests. Hitting the sweet spot for fans of Rice's vampire fiction, this outing gives due attention to her series characters, bringing their stories up to the present day, with satisfying results. A list of terms, a prolog, and appendix of characters seamlessly usher in new readers, and help remind those who have been away for awhile. VERDICT Series fans should not miss this latest foray into Rice's magical world built around the undead, but anyone with an interest in the supernatural and aficionados of richly detailed and lush backdrops will enjoy this epic tale. [See Prepub Alert, 5/1/14.] Amanda Scott, Cambridge Springs P.L., PA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
