A stunning departure,
a surprising and compelling return from Anne Rice, perennial bestseller,
single-handed reinventor of the vampire cosmology—a new, exhilarating novel, a
deepening of her vampire mythology, and a chillingly hypnotic mystery-thriller
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, a long-awaited
novel that picks up where The Vampire
Lestat 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, fourteenth-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 is the seemingly absent, curiously
missing hero-wanderer, the dazzling, dangerous rebel-outlaw—the great hope of
the undead, the dazzling Prince Lestat.
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"Just when you think you know the whole story! Anne Rice expands the vampire realm exponentially. Such a brilliant storyteller. This book is many small books spun together.
Many ancient yet-to-be revealed vampires. So many new origin stories. So many characters from books long ago intertwined with the "new" characters.
It's all an intricate dance around the maypole of one unifying plot. Endlessly fascinating.Including a consideration of the effects of the Internet and Google Earth on their way"
—
Karen Parker (5 out of 5 stars)