You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by ejrathke
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
4.0
Something I never thought I'd be doing in 2019 is maybe fall in love with Anne Rice's books. It's something I never expected at all, honestly, since I think I assumed that Anne Rice was a terrible writer writing terrible books.
And yet here I am, nearly 1,000 pages deep into her vampire saga and about to begin the third novel. And the thing is, Rice writes in a way I wouldn't expect to be successful, and especially not so wildly popular. Here she picks up with Lestat, a vampire I hated in Interview with the Vampire. And I think that's how you're meant to feel about Lestat. But now I've fallen in love with him, too, just as I fell in love with Louis. In almost every way, Lestat is Louis' opposite. Rather than brood and wait, Lestat rushes in, thoughtlessly, and takes outrageous actions.
What I didn't expect from all of this was a novel that just races by. But the strangest thing is that very little happens over the course of even 100 pages. But at the same time, so much is constantly happening. And I think this is the strength of Rice. She writes atmospheric novels that are deeply relationship focused and much less interested in the pomp and circumstance of vampires. At the same time, she invents a very interesting world, a whole vampire culture, religion, and mythology that msot of the vampires living have never even heard of.
It's quietly brilliant, honestly. These vain, existential immortals seeking answers that may not exist, seeking the origin of their kind but finding only immense holes in history, and a world where only young vampires remain.
But, yes, here is the true story of Lestat. At first I thought this was meant to counter Interview with the Vampire, recontextualizing the series as a sequence of unreliable narrators. But something near the end of the novel sort of throws that out the window, which is interesting, but also makes things a bit less interesting.
Anyrate, I may love these books. They're far from perfect and there are aspects that just feel like they shouldn't work. And maybe they don't. But these novels are much better than I would have ever expected.
Onto Queen of the Damned!
And yet here I am, nearly 1,000 pages deep into her vampire saga and about to begin the third novel. And the thing is, Rice writes in a way I wouldn't expect to be successful, and especially not so wildly popular. Here she picks up with Lestat, a vampire I hated in Interview with the Vampire. And I think that's how you're meant to feel about Lestat. But now I've fallen in love with him, too, just as I fell in love with Louis. In almost every way, Lestat is Louis' opposite. Rather than brood and wait, Lestat rushes in, thoughtlessly, and takes outrageous actions.
What I didn't expect from all of this was a novel that just races by. But the strangest thing is that very little happens over the course of even 100 pages. But at the same time, so much is constantly happening. And I think this is the strength of Rice. She writes atmospheric novels that are deeply relationship focused and much less interested in the pomp and circumstance of vampires. At the same time, she invents a very interesting world, a whole vampire culture, religion, and mythology that msot of the vampires living have never even heard of.
It's quietly brilliant, honestly. These vain, existential immortals seeking answers that may not exist, seeking the origin of their kind but finding only immense holes in history, and a world where only young vampires remain.
But, yes, here is the true story of Lestat. At first I thought this was meant to counter Interview with the Vampire, recontextualizing the series as a sequence of unreliable narrators. But something near the end of the novel sort of throws that out the window, which is interesting, but also makes things a bit less interesting.
Anyrate, I may love these books. They're far from perfect and there are aspects that just feel like they shouldn't work. And maybe they don't. But these novels are much better than I would have ever expected.
Onto Queen of the Damned!