Vampire Chronicles 1: Interview with the vampire
EDITORIAL REVIEW: Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force--a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.It is a novel only Anne Rice could write...."Magnificent, compulsively readable."CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Vampire Chronicles 10: Blood Canticle
SUMMARY: Anne Rice continues her astonishing Vampire Chronicles in a new novel that begins whereBlackwood Farmleft off and tells the story of Lestat's quest for redemption, goodness, and the love of Rowan Mayfair. Welcome back to Blackwood Farm. Here are all of the brilliantly conceived characters that make up the two worlds of vampires and witches: Mona Mayfair, who's come to the farm to die and is brought into the realm of the undead; her uncle, Julian Mayfair, guardian of the family, determined to forever torment Lestat for what he has done to Mona; Rowan Mayfair, brilliant neurosurgeon and witch, who finds herself dangerously drawn to the all-powerful Lestat; her husband, Michael Curry, hero of the Mayfair Chronicles, who seeks Lestat's help with the temporary madness of his wife; Ash Templeton, a 5,000-year-old Taltos who has taken Mona's child; and Patsy, the country-western singer, who returns to avenge her death at the hands of her son, Quinn Blackwood. Delightfully, at the book's centre is the Vampire Lestat, once the epitome of evil, now pursuing the transformation set in motion withMemnoch the Devil. He struggles with his vampirism and yearns for goodness, purity and love, as he saves Patsy's ghost from the dark realm of the Earthbound, uncovers the mystery of the Taltos and unselfishly decides the fate of his beloved Rowan Mayfair. A story of love and loyalty, of the search for passion and promise,Blood Canticleis Anne Rice at her finest.
Vampire Chronicles 2: The vampire Lestat
EDITORIAL REVIEW: Returning to the hypnotic world she so brilliantly created in **Interview with the Vampire**, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her power to enthrall. With the same richness of drama, atmosphere and incident, she tells the fantastic story of the vampire Lestat, whom we first perceived as the seductive devil-vampire of **Interview with the Vampire** and whom we now follow through the ages as he searches for the origin and meaning of his own dark immortality. And who, more and more, engages our sympathy until he stands revealed as a questing romantic, a vampire-hero with his own strange and passionate courage and morality.As the novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five years' sleep, and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of millions. And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the riddle of his own existence.As he speaks we are plunged back into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling troupe of actors. We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first apprentice at a boulevard theater, then its most celebrated actor, idolized, adored by many and--night after night--watched by one . . . until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy, he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally joined to the unholy brotherhood.We follow Lestat as he searches for others like him--in churches and brothels, in gambling houses, huts and palaces--sometimes joined by the vampire-angel Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty are equally transcendent. We follow Lestat as he travels from the snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins, sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing always that the central truth eludes him.But all the while, throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has made enemies among his brethren--vampires who are in terror of his questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to rule. And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is at last revealed. Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning climax, Lestat's vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic freeways of the twentieth century.
Vampire Chronicles 3: The Queen of the Damned
SUMMARY: "A welcome chance to catch up with old friends...Fascinating...When we emerge from its folds, there's good news on the last page: 'The chronicle of the vampires will continue.' Yum."PHILADELPHIA INQUIRERA feat of mesmerizing storytelling, a chilling entertainment, THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED unleashes Akasha, the Queen herself, who has risen from a six-thousand year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to "save" mankind and destroy Lestat--in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead. SUMMARY: "A welcome chance to catch up with old friends...Fascinating...When we emerge from its folds, there's good news on the last page: 'The chronicle of the vampires will continue.' Yum."PHILADELPHIA INQUIRERA feat of mesmerizing storytelling, a chilling entertainment, THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED unleashes Akasha, the Queen herself, who has risen from a six-thousand year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to "save" mankind and destroy Lestat--in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead.
Vampire Chronicles 4: The Tale of the Body Thief
SUMMARY: "A wonderfully mesmerizing adventure, delving into the convoluted mind of one of modern fiction's most famous anti-heroes, the vampire Lestat. Rice's writing is elegant and thought-provoking and her story is a gem."THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNEFor centuries Lestat has been a courted prince in the universe of the dead. Now he is alone and everything he once believed in seems false. So he embarks on a dangerous journey to destroy his doubts and loneliness forever....
Vampire Chronicles 5: Memnoch the Devil
SUMMARY: In Anne Rice's extraordinary novel, the Vampire Lestat--outsides, canny monster, hero-wanderer--is at last offered the chance to be redeemed.He is brought into direct confrontation with both God and the Devil, and into the land of Death.We are in New York. The city is blanketed in snow. Through the whiteness Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic daughter of a drug lord, the woman who arouses Lestat's tenderness as no mortal ever has.While torn between his vampire passions and his overwhelming love for Dora, Lestat is confronted by the most dangerous of adversaries he has yet known.He is snatched from the world itself by the mysterious Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil. He is invited to be a witness at the Creation. He is taken like the ancient prophets into the heavenly realm and is ushered into Purgatory.He must decide if he can believe in the Devil or in God. And finally, he must decide which, if either, he will serve.In the first four Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summoned up for us worlds that are fantastic and distant, making them as resonant, real, and immediate as our own. In this, her most daring and darkest novel, she takes us, with Lestat, into the mythical world that is most important to us--into the realms of our own theology.
Vampire Chronicles 9: Blackwood Farm
SUMMARY: In her new novel, perennial bestseller Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative -- her Vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches -- to give us a world of classic deep-south luxury and ancestral secrets. Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelgänger, “Goblin,” a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can’t escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelgänger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself. As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn’s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds. A story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny, Blackwood Farm is Anne Rice at her mesmerizing best. From the Hardcover edition.