Anne Rice's Blood Canticle or Dude, where's my personality?
Hello.
I'm very new to this group. It was recommended to me. I hope I am doing this right. I was going to post a scathing review of Twilight but I just read that those aren't welcome right now. You can find my Twilight review on amazon and the Internet movie data base. On Amazon I'm Amanda Pike, and on The Internet movie data base I'm JTheGoblinKing.
Since the Twilight review isn't really welcome here's my review of Anne Rice's Blood Canticle. I actually wrote this for a fan group back in 2003 so this is a re-post.
I hope I am doing this right. Please forgive me if I'm not. I pretty much got chased out of a Dresden Files fan group because I posted my first few messages wrong and it's left me reluctant to join new groups.
I call this book review: 'Dude, where's my personality?' Lestat acts nothing like himself in this book. He did for the first few pages but that's about it...
To review this book I have to look back at the other Vampire Chronicles.
Ever since the mid-nineteen seventies, when a woman named Anne Rice reinvented the world of Gothic Horror, the fascination with vampires and rock music escalated in to what we know now to be Goth Culture.
The invention of the characters of Louis, Claudia, Armand and of course, The Vampire Lestat, turned the entire mythology of vampirism upside down.
Now we move on. Several years after having written Interview With The Vampire, (Anne Rice's strange way of coming to grips with the death of her daughter, Michelle to Leukemia) there are now eleven vampire Chronicles. One told by Louis, a melancholy and brooding vampire who suffers for his damnation in a byronic, and now quite tiresome cliche of vampiric sorrow.
We move on to the true star of Anne Rice's vampire Chronicles, Lestat.
Lestat- the favourite of Anne Rice's vampires, the angst driven, and charismatic, rebel without a clue. Lestat takes the spotlight in telling three stories and dictating a fourth tale to his friend, David Talbot, in the most questionable of Anne Rice's vampire books, Memnoch the Devil. After that Pandora, an ancient vampire tells her story to David Talbot. Vittorio, an unheard of Italian boy vampire then tells his story. This is followed by Armand giving a longer and slightly annoying version of the tale he told Lestat in the second Vampire Chronicle, The Vampire Lestat. Merrick comes next, a tale told by David Talbot about a witch brought into the fold of vampirism. Blood and Gold comes after this. It's a longer version of the story that Marius told Lestat in The Vampire Lestat.
I'm sensing a pattern at this point. Why don't we just re-read the most loved story in The Vampire Lestat? Or the ill-informed can watch the badly done Queen of the damned movie. The movie poorly condenses the two stories of The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the damned together in a half-baked and low rent pile of mush that bares almost no resemblance to the actual novels save for a few character names.
Then comes the novel Blackwood Farm, to make a long story short, Lestat helps a young male vampire rid himself of a ghost that has been haunting him for most of his life. And now, here we are at Blood Canticle.
The vampire novels of Anne Rice in order are (I put a star next to the only ones I feel are truly worth reading.)
l. * Interview with the Vampire. (1976) (Made in to the movie with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt)
2. * The Vampire Lestat. (1985) (adapted into two musicals)
3 * The queen of the damned. (1986) (Made in to a bad B movie)
Tale of the body thief. (1991)
Memnoch The Devil. (1995)
Pandora. (1997)
Vittorio the vampire. (1998)
The vampire Armand. (1999)
Merrick. (2000)
Blood and Gold. (2001)
Blackwood Farm. (2002)
Blood Canticle (to be published October 2003)
It gets tricky as of the book Merrick because that's when Anne Rice's vampire novels merge with her witch stories - known as The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, which in order are as follows...
The Witching Hour (soon to be a mini-series on NBC)
Lasher
Taltos
Merrick
Blackwood Farm
Blood Canticle
I think I was fourteen-years-old when I realized I liked Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat. I had an obsession with vampires and Gothic horror in general. And I found out about the novel Interview with the vampire. So I read that novel in the course of one weekend. At the back of the book it advertised The Vampire Lestat. And I was delighted. I wanted to know his side of things. I believed he had a story to tell. It seemed obvious to me from the little hints in Interview with The Vampire. And I was absolutely delighted with Lestat and his rock persona. At the time I was also just getting in to David Bowie. And I saw a comparison to Ziggy Stardust and Lestat. Lestat- a vampire pretending to be a rock star pretending to be a vampire. And David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust- A rock star pretending to be an alien, pretending to be a rock star pretending to be an alien.
I was in love. And it wasn't the 'charisma of the undead' so get that idea right out of your heads. I don't usually find vampires very sexy. To be honest, the brooding, byronic vampires bore me.
I loved Lestat's rebellion. I loved his angst. I loved his passion. I loved his inability to be discouraged for very long. I loved his human questioning, which was handled very differently than Louis' brooding. I loved his need to escape and it's realization when he went to Paris. I loved his sensuality. His passion. I felt a connection to him. A vampire Glam Rock musician- basis for Goth culture. Replacing the old cliche of the cape and castle with a leather jacket and motorcycle. I had wondered where the modern vampire style had come from!
I spent the summer of 1996 reading The Vampire Chronicles. I felt slightly cheated with Tale of the body Thief. It was cliche but good for comic relief but it didn't have the same... fire as The Queen of the damned (novel, not film with the same name). It seemed like something had been lost.
By the end of the summer I found Memnoch The Devil, which was still a pretty new novel at the time and was only just coming out as a large paper back, after the initial hardcover release. And I read it. But it upset me and disappointed me.
Anne seems very obsessed with religion and history lately and I think it hinders on the actual story. Also, a part of Lestat's charm was that he was searching for answers in the chaos, a reason, and was uncertain of any of the universe's mysteries. Now it seems a part of that charm is gone. Anne's trying to correct that now by putting a shadow of doubt on what the things Lestat saw might have been but it's clear she wants us to think he did see God and The Devil and that poor vampire has learned that there is no real reason. The Universe is governed by powerful lunatics. No wonder he went mad with grief. The poor, damned bastard. I had thought she ruined him, especially after he had laid on the chapel floor for so long.
Here's the plot in a nut shell. At Blackwood Farm Lestat makes Mona Mayfair in to a vampire. Mona is Quinn Blackwood's lover, Quinn is a vampire himself, and he wishes to be with Mona forever.
After making Mona a vampire Lestat vows to help her find her daughter (who is a Taltos) Now let me explain, a Tatos is a tall, slender, naive, human-like race that has walked this Earth, hidden from humans for centuries. Somehow certain human women are able to mate with Taltos males and produce Taltos offspring. Mona mated with a male Taltos while she was still mortal and as a result had a Taltos daughter. The daughter became an adult instantaneously after being born, with all the knowledge of her race within her mind- as is common for Taltos births.
To help Mona find her unearthly child Lestat is forced to meet and expose himself to Rowan Mayfair- basically the leader of the Mayfair family. The Mayfairs are a large, wealthy family of witches who inhabit New Orleans.
Rowan Mayfair is the 'genius' brain surgeon who gets tricked by a Taltos ghost in The Witching Hour. And all she wants is a live Taltos 'specimen' to study, poke, prod, keep captive and dissect. She wants to capture and study a non-human creature. And yet somehow Lestat falls in love with her! This woman is a bitch and as best as I can put it, she's a mad scientist with her very own medical centre with underlings. To top it off, Rowan got impregnated with a Taltos daughter and later sustained heavy brain damage that her daughter healed her of. And how did Rowan repay this daughter? She shot and killed her.
Before Rowan knows Lestat's a vampire she hates him but after he's revealed and it's also revealed that Mona is now a vampire and no longer a dying mother of a Taltos, everything's all right. And she seems okay with it.
Though Lestat tries to contact Maharet (the only articulate leader of the vampires) for help in tracking the Taltos she does not reply. He contacts her multiple times through telepathy yet she refuses to answer him and finally an E-mail arrives at The Talamasca mother house (giving away Maharet's screen name to The Talamasca - though they don't tell you, the reader, what it is) and she tells Lestat how to find the remaining Taltos.
The Talamasca is a secret society of human beings who know about the vampires and have observed them from a distance, they're scholars of the occult.
We are later told that Quinn Blackwood's screen name is Noble Abelard and Mona's screen name is Ophelia Immortal, supposedly on the same account.
Now here's the only exciting part of the book: Lestat, Mona, and Quinn go to the tropical island where a colony of Taltos are living. They find three surviving Taltos have been enslaved by drug pirates who stumbled upon the island. The vampires slaughter the pirates and free the Taltos. Sadly, Mona's daughter is not among them. Her daughter, Morrigan and her Taltos mate, Ash had been killed.
One of the surviving Taltos had betrayed her kind to the pirates so as punishment the vampires hand her over to Rowan to be a live specimen. I was relieved when this Taltos explains herself and she, and her two companions are allowed to roam Mayfair Medical centre, freely. And they choose to live there under Rowan's supervision.
Lestat unselfishly talks Rowan out of leaving her husband, Michael, and refuses it
when she asks for The Dark Gift of vampirism. I guess that's the unselfishness of love talked about on Amazon.com's plot summery. Now does that sound like something Lestat would do, to you? Michael is Rowan's husband, whom she has left before. She's SO faithful! I've been told that in some proof read editions she is made a vampire but in mine, which was handed to Knoff in October 2002, she's not.
Here are some things I disliked about this book: Brace yourselves dears, this is a dozy.
Lestat keeps praising The Pope and out right said The Pope can do no wrong because he is The Pope. And that even if the Pope does say something that isn't true it automatically becomes true, having happened in some form because the Pope said it did because God ordained that The Pope must always be right. Anne Rice is REALLY kissing ass here in this. Lestat questioned everything! He didn't even believe for sure there was an after-life in his 'autobiography' (The Vampire Lestat). What the Hell happened to the rebel iconoclast who questioned everything and everyone?
I'm aware that Armand (an annoyingly contrary and vicious boy-vampire) convinced Lestat that he must kill the rogue vampires in the novel Merrick but it makes no sense that Lestat would ever be convinced of anything by Armand! If you know anything of their history this would be obvious. Also Lestat's killing rogues and rule breakers, those who break his rules. It's an hypocrisy! He is a rogue and rule breaker! This is the vampire who wept for Baby Jenks, of all people (a vicious and extremely ignorant young vampire who gets killed in the novel The Queen of the damned), and yet now in The novel Blood Canticle, Lestat just killed a handful of fledglings who LITERALLY worship him! That's not Lestat! And he's grown cold. When Mona asked him 'What if they beg for their lives?' he replied with 'They usually do?' Lestat used to at least have some compassion for his own. He's spared Armand's life and he's done a little of a lot worse than any of these rogues. We're talking about the ultimate rogue and rule breaker killing rogues and rule breakers! Doesn't Anne Rice see the hypicricy here?
Also, Lestat's own mother wore men's pantaloons two hundred and twenty years ago. He liked eighties androgyny and was a rock star but he yells at Mona to change her dress because it's 'slutty'. Later she apologizes and agrees, the dress was slutty and she should have been obedient. Just because Anne Rice has turned in to an old fart doesn't mean her twenty-one-year-old immortal should turn in to one as well. Now, I admit Mona
IS a slut. In the novel Lasher she seduces each of her male cousins in to making love with her but in this novel she acted more like Lestat then Lestat.
Lestat only acted like himself for the first three pages of this novel. After that everything went down hill. It was a tease.
And since when is a dress too 'slutty' for Lestat?
And Lestat's in love with Rowan Mayfair. They saved the Taltos all right but one had sided with the humans who enslaved them (my guess at the time of reading this had been that she was brainwashed or did it out of self-preservation) so EVERYONE was okay with Rowan doping this one up with sedatives and taking her prisoner to make her a live specimen, prisoner, gina-pig at Mayfair Medical centre to be poked, prodded, and studied like an animal indefinitely. There's something VERY disturbing about this. And everyone was happy about it.
I was relieved at the end when this Taltos explained herself and now the three surviving Taltos live 'happy' at Mayfair Medical.
Lestat keeps using the words cool and dude so often it's making me cringe. Hence, why I wanted to call this review 'Dude, where's my personality?'
Lestat unselfishly talks Rowan out of leaving Michael and refuses it when she asks for The Dark Gift of vampirism. Now does that sound like something Lestat would do, to you?
Also, Lestat says he's still afraid of technology! He claims that when he first saw a locomotive it almost ran him down. And when Mona suggests building a website Lestat replies with 'No real vampire has ever built a website and let's keep it that way.' This from the vampire who became a rock star and broke all the rules!
There are so many inconstancies lately, I know I'm nitpicking and being petty but my suspension of disbelief won't stand for an abrupt change from a consistent description or storyline.
I have figured out why I despise most of the later Vampire Chronicles.
Lestat, the rogue and rule breaker- the very reason why we love him, for his individualistic, quasi-Bohemian, questioning, rebellious, iconoclastic nature has became a sheep- a conformist! A non-questioning, hard-core Catholic! It's pod-person Lestat as some others have said to me. What the Hell happened? Has Anne Rice lost touch so completely? She thinks throwing in cool and dude every few paragraphs and describing his physical body over and over again makes up for twisting the personality? It wasn't the blond hair, the blue eyes or the fangs- I liked him as the rebel without a clue! I liked the iconoclastic brat prince, rogue- mischievous vampire who only fed on evil-doers and loved the freedom of the modern, secular age!
Now he's some prudish, self-righteous bastard. The first vampire priest! What the Hell is this? He's even gone as far as being subscribed to a Catholic news letter! This from a vampire rock star! Is Anne Rice forgetting to take her medication? Well, it's not as bad as the novel Memnoch The Devil but this is still pretty bad.
My advice to anyone considering reading Anne Rice's vampire novels, stick with the first three. After that there are just too many inconsistancies. Read Interview with the vampire, The vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the damned. Don't go any further than that.
I'm just very, very disappointed in this final book to the series. I've been reading Anne Rice's novels for seven-years-now and I used to adore her character, Lestat. But now, in these newer books, my reasons for adoring the character have been lost. It just seems like such a shame. So much could have been done. But it almost seems like the vampire Chronicles, from Tale of the Body thief on were written by someone else entirely. The original feeling, the nature of the characters, it's gone. She should have quit while she was a head.
Anne Rice is now scared of dying so she's gotten in good graces again with The Catholic Church and she's using her vampires to suck up to the church. Her constant insistence on faith only tells me she's more scared than when she wrote The Vampire Lestat and her anti-hero questioned everything. The more she obsesses, the more I can imagine the fear she must have that she's trying to reassure herself and hide away all the doubts she used to have. Her faith is a frail security blanket that she's clutching to as if someone will rip it away from her.
I also believe she's a bit of a sell out. The Vampire Chronicles should have ended years ago but she went on with faulty and cliche stories, and lost sight of the characters' personalities for the sake of quick cash. She pushed out trivial stories that had no real purpose or were just longer versions of short stories told within one of her more memorable novels.
What she's done with Lestat would be like turning Stephen King's Carrie into a happy Cheer Leader with a Buddhist father. And I am just very disappointed. The Rebel Without a Clue has turned in to The Righteous without coherency....
I'm just very disappointed in this book. Stick with the first three vampire Chronicles and don't move beyond that. I was very disappointed in this book. The first three pages were a tease to those of us who loved the rebellious Rock and roll vampire Lestat.
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Since Anne Rice claims Lestat of Blood Canticle and the novel itself is very close to the content of The Vampire Lestat allow me to make a proper comparison...
Look at the differences...
Early Lestat: Wept for witches burt at the stake becaue Church and state were connected making religious fears into laws.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he says chuch and state should not be seperated.
Early Lestat: (Memnoch The Devil) Lost his left eye
Later Lestat: (Blood Canticle / Blackwood Farm) It's his right eye...
Early Lestat: Helped create what is today Goth Culture.
Later Lestat: Following Goth trend and even refers to himself as a Goth... So much for his individuality and unwillingness to conform.
Early Lestat: Speaks like a cross between Sam Spade and a flatboatman in 1984
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he speaks like a Ninja Turtle...
Early Lestat: Food is poison to him.
Later Lestat: In Blackwood Farm he eats a communion wafer.
Early Lestat: Wanted to be a teaching brother but never really believed God was in those halls but rather believed in the goodness of the men there and the cleansliness and order of the place.
Later Lestat: Wants to be a Saint for religious reasions instead of actual ethical ones...
Early Lestat: Questioned everything.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle said The Pope can never be wrong. And this is odd because he represents Anne Rice's beliefs and The Pope is against gay marriage, Anne is pro-gay marriage. There have been Popes who said all Jewish people are evil and that the crucades were good and Mary Magdoline was a prostitute (The vatican only recenlty corrected this last one but a lot of people don't even know that she was only possessed of seven demons, not a prostitute.
Early Lestat: wrote on a computer word processor and hacked into a police data base in Tale of the body thief.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he is afraid of computers and doesn't know how to send an E-mail.
Early Lestat: loved how people walk almost naked in the Southrn heat. And was basically a slut.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he chastises Mona for being slutty.
Early Lestat: was a rock star
Later Lestat: sang a country song composed by a homophobe and is a Dixie Chicks fan...
Early Lestat: was in love with a woman from Washington named Gretchen and a New Yorker named Dora and never spoke as humans as divided into races.
Later Lestat: says only Southerners know how to treat blacks and yankees are all racist (So I guess being black means you're not Southern or Northern?)
Early Lestat: 'Tell me how bad I am, it makes me feel so good.'
Later Lestat: 'I want to be a saint.' and 'I DON'T WANT TO BE BAD ANYMORE!'
Early Lestat: Felt pity even for Armand. (It's why he didn't decapitate him in The Vampire Lestat)
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he shouts at Mona to get off his property when she starts crying after a fight with him.
Early Lestat: Wept for people like Baby Jenks
Later Lestat: Not only kills his own kind that love him but even those that beg for their lives.
Early Lestat: Rogue and rule breaker
Later Lestat: Kills rogues and rule breakers
Early Lestat: Started poor and was content that way and know artists and musicians and actors who were poor, they were his friends.
Later Lestat: Considers poor people, and those in 'trailer parks' to be the bottom of the latter in humanity...
Early Lestat: A rock super star who publishes books.
Later Lestat: Forbids quinn from buiilding a website because of the exposure risk. (Uh, huh...)
Early Lestat: Fed on murderers who feel no remorse.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he is in love with Rowan who murdered her daughter who had been saving her life and still wants a live version of her daugher's species to dissect.
Early Lestat: Acts impulsively.
Later Lestat: Won't make Rowan a vampire because he is patient and it's 'wrong' when she has work that must be done as a mortal...
Early Lestat: Didn't mind his mother dressing as a man.
Later Lestat: Seems to hate it and apparently condemned her for it in The Vampire Lestat according to Mona. Umm... Where?
Early Lestat: Saw optimisn in a secular age of innocence and himself as an unnecessary evil in the world wanting to be good.
Later Lestat: Sees evil everywhere but in himself. (Frollo from Hunchback of NotreDame anyone?)
Early Lestat: was 'innocent' for his lack of forced beliefs that he did not use distorted truths to reinforce. - paraphrasing Marius
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he subscribed to a Catholic news letter and says The Pope is infailable.
Early Lestat: Believed in The Savage Garden
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he renounces The Savage Garden and only believes in the maker.
Early Lestat: Said nothing justifies the suffering of a child
Later Lestat: Actually implied that Roger in Memnoch The Devil, when just a child, should have let The old captain have his way with him sexually.
Early Lestat: Remembered his mortal life viviedly and told us his first kill was the old man in Magnus's castle.
Later Lestat: It seems that, according to Memnoch, as a mortal he killed someone in a bar fight. Now considering Lestat's obsession with death when he was mortal wouldn't he have told us about this if it was true?
Early Lestat: In The Vampire Lestat he lost is virginity to an actress when he ran away with the troupe before his brothers dragged him home. Then he became anti-social until he met Nicki.
Later Lestat: In Memnoch The Devil he claimed that fathers came to the castle complaining that he got their daughters pregnant. Would Lestat really be indifferent to getting someone pregnant when he was concerned he might have gotten the waitress pregnant in Tale of the body thief? Seriously, with his obsession with goodness and the value of life that doesn't sound like him.
Early Lestat: Wanted to be an actor.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle has embraced a religion that condemns the theatre as being tained by The Devil.
It seems to me he lost the better faith, the faith in humanity and goodness and gained something cold and actually fundimentally meaningless. It also seems to me that what I'm discribing are direct opposites of character nature.
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I also have a list of inconsistencies in The Vampire Chronicles but I'm afraid if I post them here I'd make my review too long.
I'm very new to this group. It was recommended to me. I hope I am doing this right. I was going to post a scathing review of Twilight but I just read that those aren't welcome right now. You can find my Twilight review on amazon and the Internet movie data base. On Amazon I'm Amanda Pike, and on The Internet movie data base I'm JTheGoblinKing.
Since the Twilight review isn't really welcome here's my review of Anne Rice's Blood Canticle. I actually wrote this for a fan group back in 2003 so this is a re-post.
I hope I am doing this right. Please forgive me if I'm not. I pretty much got chased out of a Dresden Files fan group because I posted my first few messages wrong and it's left me reluctant to join new groups.
Book Review of
Blood Canticle by Anne Rice:
Dude, where's my personality?
Reviewed by Amanda Pike
Blood Canticle by Anne Rice:
Dude, where's my personality?
Reviewed by Amanda Pike
I call this book review: 'Dude, where's my personality?' Lestat acts nothing like himself in this book. He did for the first few pages but that's about it...
To review this book I have to look back at the other Vampire Chronicles.
Ever since the mid-nineteen seventies, when a woman named Anne Rice reinvented the world of Gothic Horror, the fascination with vampires and rock music escalated in to what we know now to be Goth Culture.
The invention of the characters of Louis, Claudia, Armand and of course, The Vampire Lestat, turned the entire mythology of vampirism upside down.
Now we move on. Several years after having written Interview With The Vampire, (Anne Rice's strange way of coming to grips with the death of her daughter, Michelle to Leukemia) there are now eleven vampire Chronicles. One told by Louis, a melancholy and brooding vampire who suffers for his damnation in a byronic, and now quite tiresome cliche of vampiric sorrow.
We move on to the true star of Anne Rice's vampire Chronicles, Lestat.
Lestat- the favourite of Anne Rice's vampires, the angst driven, and charismatic, rebel without a clue. Lestat takes the spotlight in telling three stories and dictating a fourth tale to his friend, David Talbot, in the most questionable of Anne Rice's vampire books, Memnoch the Devil. After that Pandora, an ancient vampire tells her story to David Talbot. Vittorio, an unheard of Italian boy vampire then tells his story. This is followed by Armand giving a longer and slightly annoying version of the tale he told Lestat in the second Vampire Chronicle, The Vampire Lestat. Merrick comes next, a tale told by David Talbot about a witch brought into the fold of vampirism. Blood and Gold comes after this. It's a longer version of the story that Marius told Lestat in The Vampire Lestat.
I'm sensing a pattern at this point. Why don't we just re-read the most loved story in The Vampire Lestat? Or the ill-informed can watch the badly done Queen of the damned movie. The movie poorly condenses the two stories of The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the damned together in a half-baked and low rent pile of mush that bares almost no resemblance to the actual novels save for a few character names.
Then comes the novel Blackwood Farm, to make a long story short, Lestat helps a young male vampire rid himself of a ghost that has been haunting him for most of his life. And now, here we are at Blood Canticle.
The vampire novels of Anne Rice in order are (I put a star next to the only ones I feel are truly worth reading.)
l. * Interview with the Vampire. (1976) (Made in to the movie with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt)
2. * The Vampire Lestat. (1985) (adapted into two musicals)
3 * The queen of the damned. (1986) (Made in to a bad B movie)
Tale of the body thief. (1991)
Memnoch The Devil. (1995)
Pandora. (1997)
Vittorio the vampire. (1998)
The vampire Armand. (1999)
Merrick. (2000)
Blood and Gold. (2001)
Blackwood Farm. (2002)
Blood Canticle (to be published October 2003)
It gets tricky as of the book Merrick because that's when Anne Rice's vampire novels merge with her witch stories - known as The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, which in order are as follows...
The Witching Hour (soon to be a mini-series on NBC)
Lasher
Taltos
Merrick
Blackwood Farm
Blood Canticle
I think I was fourteen-years-old when I realized I liked Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat. I had an obsession with vampires and Gothic horror in general. And I found out about the novel Interview with the vampire. So I read that novel in the course of one weekend. At the back of the book it advertised The Vampire Lestat. And I was delighted. I wanted to know his side of things. I believed he had a story to tell. It seemed obvious to me from the little hints in Interview with The Vampire. And I was absolutely delighted with Lestat and his rock persona. At the time I was also just getting in to David Bowie. And I saw a comparison to Ziggy Stardust and Lestat. Lestat- a vampire pretending to be a rock star pretending to be a vampire. And David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust- A rock star pretending to be an alien, pretending to be a rock star pretending to be an alien.
I was in love. And it wasn't the 'charisma of the undead' so get that idea right out of your heads. I don't usually find vampires very sexy. To be honest, the brooding, byronic vampires bore me.
I loved Lestat's rebellion. I loved his angst. I loved his passion. I loved his inability to be discouraged for very long. I loved his human questioning, which was handled very differently than Louis' brooding. I loved his need to escape and it's realization when he went to Paris. I loved his sensuality. His passion. I felt a connection to him. A vampire Glam Rock musician- basis for Goth culture. Replacing the old cliche of the cape and castle with a leather jacket and motorcycle. I had wondered where the modern vampire style had come from!
I spent the summer of 1996 reading The Vampire Chronicles. I felt slightly cheated with Tale of the body Thief. It was cliche but good for comic relief but it didn't have the same... fire as The Queen of the damned (novel, not film with the same name). It seemed like something had been lost.
By the end of the summer I found Memnoch The Devil, which was still a pretty new novel at the time and was only just coming out as a large paper back, after the initial hardcover release. And I read it. But it upset me and disappointed me.
Anne seems very obsessed with religion and history lately and I think it hinders on the actual story. Also, a part of Lestat's charm was that he was searching for answers in the chaos, a reason, and was uncertain of any of the universe's mysteries. Now it seems a part of that charm is gone. Anne's trying to correct that now by putting a shadow of doubt on what the things Lestat saw might have been but it's clear she wants us to think he did see God and The Devil and that poor vampire has learned that there is no real reason. The Universe is governed by powerful lunatics. No wonder he went mad with grief. The poor, damned bastard. I had thought she ruined him, especially after he had laid on the chapel floor for so long.
Here's the plot in a nut shell. At Blackwood Farm Lestat makes Mona Mayfair in to a vampire. Mona is Quinn Blackwood's lover, Quinn is a vampire himself, and he wishes to be with Mona forever.
After making Mona a vampire Lestat vows to help her find her daughter (who is a Taltos) Now let me explain, a Tatos is a tall, slender, naive, human-like race that has walked this Earth, hidden from humans for centuries. Somehow certain human women are able to mate with Taltos males and produce Taltos offspring. Mona mated with a male Taltos while she was still mortal and as a result had a Taltos daughter. The daughter became an adult instantaneously after being born, with all the knowledge of her race within her mind- as is common for Taltos births.
To help Mona find her unearthly child Lestat is forced to meet and expose himself to Rowan Mayfair- basically the leader of the Mayfair family. The Mayfairs are a large, wealthy family of witches who inhabit New Orleans.
Rowan Mayfair is the 'genius' brain surgeon who gets tricked by a Taltos ghost in The Witching Hour. And all she wants is a live Taltos 'specimen' to study, poke, prod, keep captive and dissect. She wants to capture and study a non-human creature. And yet somehow Lestat falls in love with her! This woman is a bitch and as best as I can put it, she's a mad scientist with her very own medical centre with underlings. To top it off, Rowan got impregnated with a Taltos daughter and later sustained heavy brain damage that her daughter healed her of. And how did Rowan repay this daughter? She shot and killed her.
Before Rowan knows Lestat's a vampire she hates him but after he's revealed and it's also revealed that Mona is now a vampire and no longer a dying mother of a Taltos, everything's all right. And she seems okay with it.
Though Lestat tries to contact Maharet (the only articulate leader of the vampires) for help in tracking the Taltos she does not reply. He contacts her multiple times through telepathy yet she refuses to answer him and finally an E-mail arrives at The Talamasca mother house (giving away Maharet's screen name to The Talamasca - though they don't tell you, the reader, what it is) and she tells Lestat how to find the remaining Taltos.
The Talamasca is a secret society of human beings who know about the vampires and have observed them from a distance, they're scholars of the occult.
We are later told that Quinn Blackwood's screen name is Noble Abelard and Mona's screen name is Ophelia Immortal, supposedly on the same account.
Now here's the only exciting part of the book: Lestat, Mona, and Quinn go to the tropical island where a colony of Taltos are living. They find three surviving Taltos have been enslaved by drug pirates who stumbled upon the island. The vampires slaughter the pirates and free the Taltos. Sadly, Mona's daughter is not among them. Her daughter, Morrigan and her Taltos mate, Ash had been killed.
One of the surviving Taltos had betrayed her kind to the pirates so as punishment the vampires hand her over to Rowan to be a live specimen. I was relieved when this Taltos explains herself and she, and her two companions are allowed to roam Mayfair Medical centre, freely. And they choose to live there under Rowan's supervision.
Lestat unselfishly talks Rowan out of leaving her husband, Michael, and refuses it
when she asks for The Dark Gift of vampirism. I guess that's the unselfishness of love talked about on Amazon.com's plot summery. Now does that sound like something Lestat would do, to you? Michael is Rowan's husband, whom she has left before. She's SO faithful! I've been told that in some proof read editions she is made a vampire but in mine, which was handed to Knoff in October 2002, she's not.
Here are some things I disliked about this book: Brace yourselves dears, this is a dozy.
Lestat keeps praising The Pope and out right said The Pope can do no wrong because he is The Pope. And that even if the Pope does say something that isn't true it automatically becomes true, having happened in some form because the Pope said it did because God ordained that The Pope must always be right. Anne Rice is REALLY kissing ass here in this. Lestat questioned everything! He didn't even believe for sure there was an after-life in his 'autobiography' (The Vampire Lestat). What the Hell happened to the rebel iconoclast who questioned everything and everyone?
I'm aware that Armand (an annoyingly contrary and vicious boy-vampire) convinced Lestat that he must kill the rogue vampires in the novel Merrick but it makes no sense that Lestat would ever be convinced of anything by Armand! If you know anything of their history this would be obvious. Also Lestat's killing rogues and rule breakers, those who break his rules. It's an hypocrisy! He is a rogue and rule breaker! This is the vampire who wept for Baby Jenks, of all people (a vicious and extremely ignorant young vampire who gets killed in the novel The Queen of the damned), and yet now in The novel Blood Canticle, Lestat just killed a handful of fledglings who LITERALLY worship him! That's not Lestat! And he's grown cold. When Mona asked him 'What if they beg for their lives?' he replied with 'They usually do?' Lestat used to at least have some compassion for his own. He's spared Armand's life and he's done a little of a lot worse than any of these rogues. We're talking about the ultimate rogue and rule breaker killing rogues and rule breakers! Doesn't Anne Rice see the hypicricy here?
Also, Lestat's own mother wore men's pantaloons two hundred and twenty years ago. He liked eighties androgyny and was a rock star but he yells at Mona to change her dress because it's 'slutty'. Later she apologizes and agrees, the dress was slutty and she should have been obedient. Just because Anne Rice has turned in to an old fart doesn't mean her twenty-one-year-old immortal should turn in to one as well. Now, I admit Mona
IS a slut. In the novel Lasher she seduces each of her male cousins in to making love with her but in this novel she acted more like Lestat then Lestat.
Lestat only acted like himself for the first three pages of this novel. After that everything went down hill. It was a tease.
And since when is a dress too 'slutty' for Lestat?
And Lestat's in love with Rowan Mayfair. They saved the Taltos all right but one had sided with the humans who enslaved them (my guess at the time of reading this had been that she was brainwashed or did it out of self-preservation) so EVERYONE was okay with Rowan doping this one up with sedatives and taking her prisoner to make her a live specimen, prisoner, gina-pig at Mayfair Medical centre to be poked, prodded, and studied like an animal indefinitely. There's something VERY disturbing about this. And everyone was happy about it.
I was relieved at the end when this Taltos explained herself and now the three surviving Taltos live 'happy' at Mayfair Medical.
Lestat keeps using the words cool and dude so often it's making me cringe. Hence, why I wanted to call this review 'Dude, where's my personality?'
Lestat unselfishly talks Rowan out of leaving Michael and refuses it when she asks for The Dark Gift of vampirism. Now does that sound like something Lestat would do, to you?
Also, Lestat says he's still afraid of technology! He claims that when he first saw a locomotive it almost ran him down. And when Mona suggests building a website Lestat replies with 'No real vampire has ever built a website and let's keep it that way.' This from the vampire who became a rock star and broke all the rules!
There are so many inconstancies lately, I know I'm nitpicking and being petty but my suspension of disbelief won't stand for an abrupt change from a consistent description or storyline.
I have figured out why I despise most of the later Vampire Chronicles.
Lestat, the rogue and rule breaker- the very reason why we love him, for his individualistic, quasi-Bohemian, questioning, rebellious, iconoclastic nature has became a sheep- a conformist! A non-questioning, hard-core Catholic! It's pod-person Lestat as some others have said to me. What the Hell happened? Has Anne Rice lost touch so completely? She thinks throwing in cool and dude every few paragraphs and describing his physical body over and over again makes up for twisting the personality? It wasn't the blond hair, the blue eyes or the fangs- I liked him as the rebel without a clue! I liked the iconoclastic brat prince, rogue- mischievous vampire who only fed on evil-doers and loved the freedom of the modern, secular age!
Now he's some prudish, self-righteous bastard. The first vampire priest! What the Hell is this? He's even gone as far as being subscribed to a Catholic news letter! This from a vampire rock star! Is Anne Rice forgetting to take her medication? Well, it's not as bad as the novel Memnoch The Devil but this is still pretty bad.
My advice to anyone considering reading Anne Rice's vampire novels, stick with the first three. After that there are just too many inconsistancies. Read Interview with the vampire, The vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the damned. Don't go any further than that.
I'm just very, very disappointed in this final book to the series. I've been reading Anne Rice's novels for seven-years-now and I used to adore her character, Lestat. But now, in these newer books, my reasons for adoring the character have been lost. It just seems like such a shame. So much could have been done. But it almost seems like the vampire Chronicles, from Tale of the Body thief on were written by someone else entirely. The original feeling, the nature of the characters, it's gone. She should have quit while she was a head.
Anne Rice is now scared of dying so she's gotten in good graces again with The Catholic Church and she's using her vampires to suck up to the church. Her constant insistence on faith only tells me she's more scared than when she wrote The Vampire Lestat and her anti-hero questioned everything. The more she obsesses, the more I can imagine the fear she must have that she's trying to reassure herself and hide away all the doubts she used to have. Her faith is a frail security blanket that she's clutching to as if someone will rip it away from her.
I also believe she's a bit of a sell out. The Vampire Chronicles should have ended years ago but she went on with faulty and cliche stories, and lost sight of the characters' personalities for the sake of quick cash. She pushed out trivial stories that had no real purpose or were just longer versions of short stories told within one of her more memorable novels.
What she's done with Lestat would be like turning Stephen King's Carrie into a happy Cheer Leader with a Buddhist father. And I am just very disappointed. The Rebel Without a Clue has turned in to The Righteous without coherency....
I'm just very disappointed in this book. Stick with the first three vampire Chronicles and don't move beyond that. I was very disappointed in this book. The first three pages were a tease to those of us who loved the rebellious Rock and roll vampire Lestat.
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Since Anne Rice claims Lestat of Blood Canticle and the novel itself is very close to the content of The Vampire Lestat allow me to make a proper comparison...
Look at the differences...
Early Lestat: Wept for witches burt at the stake becaue Church and state were connected making religious fears into laws.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he says chuch and state should not be seperated.
Early Lestat: (Memnoch The Devil) Lost his left eye
Later Lestat: (Blood Canticle / Blackwood Farm) It's his right eye...
Early Lestat: Helped create what is today Goth Culture.
Later Lestat: Following Goth trend and even refers to himself as a Goth... So much for his individuality and unwillingness to conform.
Early Lestat: Speaks like a cross between Sam Spade and a flatboatman in 1984
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he speaks like a Ninja Turtle...
Early Lestat: Food is poison to him.
Later Lestat: In Blackwood Farm he eats a communion wafer.
Early Lestat: Wanted to be a teaching brother but never really believed God was in those halls but rather believed in the goodness of the men there and the cleansliness and order of the place.
Later Lestat: Wants to be a Saint for religious reasions instead of actual ethical ones...
Early Lestat: Questioned everything.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle said The Pope can never be wrong. And this is odd because he represents Anne Rice's beliefs and The Pope is against gay marriage, Anne is pro-gay marriage. There have been Popes who said all Jewish people are evil and that the crucades were good and Mary Magdoline was a prostitute (The vatican only recenlty corrected this last one but a lot of people don't even know that she was only possessed of seven demons, not a prostitute.
Early Lestat: wrote on a computer word processor and hacked into a police data base in Tale of the body thief.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he is afraid of computers and doesn't know how to send an E-mail.
Early Lestat: loved how people walk almost naked in the Southrn heat. And was basically a slut.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he chastises Mona for being slutty.
Early Lestat: was a rock star
Later Lestat: sang a country song composed by a homophobe and is a Dixie Chicks fan...
Early Lestat: was in love with a woman from Washington named Gretchen and a New Yorker named Dora and never spoke as humans as divided into races.
Later Lestat: says only Southerners know how to treat blacks and yankees are all racist (So I guess being black means you're not Southern or Northern?)
Early Lestat: 'Tell me how bad I am, it makes me feel so good.'
Later Lestat: 'I want to be a saint.' and 'I DON'T WANT TO BE BAD ANYMORE!'
Early Lestat: Felt pity even for Armand. (It's why he didn't decapitate him in The Vampire Lestat)
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he shouts at Mona to get off his property when she starts crying after a fight with him.
Early Lestat: Wept for people like Baby Jenks
Later Lestat: Not only kills his own kind that love him but even those that beg for their lives.
Early Lestat: Rogue and rule breaker
Later Lestat: Kills rogues and rule breakers
Early Lestat: Started poor and was content that way and know artists and musicians and actors who were poor, they were his friends.
Later Lestat: Considers poor people, and those in 'trailer parks' to be the bottom of the latter in humanity...
Early Lestat: A rock super star who publishes books.
Later Lestat: Forbids quinn from buiilding a website because of the exposure risk. (Uh, huh...)
Early Lestat: Fed on murderers who feel no remorse.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he is in love with Rowan who murdered her daughter who had been saving her life and still wants a live version of her daugher's species to dissect.
Early Lestat: Acts impulsively.
Later Lestat: Won't make Rowan a vampire because he is patient and it's 'wrong' when she has work that must be done as a mortal...
Early Lestat: Didn't mind his mother dressing as a man.
Later Lestat: Seems to hate it and apparently condemned her for it in The Vampire Lestat according to Mona. Umm... Where?
Early Lestat: Saw optimisn in a secular age of innocence and himself as an unnecessary evil in the world wanting to be good.
Later Lestat: Sees evil everywhere but in himself. (Frollo from Hunchback of NotreDame anyone?)
Early Lestat: was 'innocent' for his lack of forced beliefs that he did not use distorted truths to reinforce. - paraphrasing Marius
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he subscribed to a Catholic news letter and says The Pope is infailable.
Early Lestat: Believed in The Savage Garden
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he renounces The Savage Garden and only believes in the maker.
Early Lestat: Said nothing justifies the suffering of a child
Later Lestat: Actually implied that Roger in Memnoch The Devil, when just a child, should have let The old captain have his way with him sexually.
Early Lestat: Remembered his mortal life viviedly and told us his first kill was the old man in Magnus's castle.
Later Lestat: It seems that, according to Memnoch, as a mortal he killed someone in a bar fight. Now considering Lestat's obsession with death when he was mortal wouldn't he have told us about this if it was true?
Early Lestat: In The Vampire Lestat he lost is virginity to an actress when he ran away with the troupe before his brothers dragged him home. Then he became anti-social until he met Nicki.
Later Lestat: In Memnoch The Devil he claimed that fathers came to the castle complaining that he got their daughters pregnant. Would Lestat really be indifferent to getting someone pregnant when he was concerned he might have gotten the waitress pregnant in Tale of the body thief? Seriously, with his obsession with goodness and the value of life that doesn't sound like him.
Early Lestat: Wanted to be an actor.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle has embraced a religion that condemns the theatre as being tained by The Devil.
It seems to me he lost the better faith, the faith in humanity and goodness and gained something cold and actually fundimentally meaningless. It also seems to me that what I'm discribing are direct opposites of character nature.
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I also have a list of inconsistencies in The Vampire Chronicles but I'm afraid if I post them here I'd make my review too long.