Blood magic (Queen of the Damned - Anne Rice)

Member Name: Bryn Pearson

Product:	Queen of the Damned - Anne Rice
Date:	21/09/01 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: follows on from the cliffhanger in Lestat.

Disadvantages: not the best of the series.

In Anne Rice's third vampire novel, the questions first posed in "Interview" are finally tackled. How did vampires come to be? Is there any point or meaning to their existence? This is not one of the stronger books because it does depend heavily on the others for context, and in many ways it is a aprt two for "The Vampire Lestat."

Lestat's rock band have been releasing songs about Akasha and Enkil, the oldest vampires, about vampirehood and suggesting to the mortal populus that they shoudl rise up. For reasons that might be connected with this, vampires everywhere deide Lestat is something of a threat to them, and Akasha rises from her long sleep to re enter the world. Everything seems to be focusing on Lestat again and he's not at all upset by this, at least, not at first.

In a second strand of plot, we have a family that dates back to ancient Egypt, the latest of whom is a psychic redhead called Jesse, who is a member of the Talamasca (a group of psychics and investigators who also feature in the Mayfair witches books.) There are two redeheaded twins who are looking for each other, and their story unfolds to reveal some fascinating things about who the vampires really are.

The Queen of the Damned, Akasha, makes off with Lestat and sets her own plans in order, and the rest you will have to read for yourself.

There are plenty of familiar faces in this book - Lestat, Louis, Armand, Daniel (the interviewer, who has picked up with Armand.) Marius as well, We also get to meet Pandora, who later on gets a whole book to herself, and David Talbot, a very important figure in the Talamasca, who is heavly involved with later tales.

By answering the question "Where do vampires come from?" Anne Rice is left with the bigger question "What does it all mean?" soemthing she can never really hope to answer, although book five, "Memnoch the Devil", does pick up where this one l
eaves off, in terms of issues.

"The Queen of the Damned" is a very action orrientated text - there's a great deal of plot and a lot more going on than you get in most of Rice's books. It can be soemthing of a system shock. I've read it a couple of times now and always find that, due to the pace of the story, I can't put the book down and end up spending a day reading it rather than rationing it carefully over a week or so. If you are reading the vampire books, it pays to read them in order - especially the first five, because the plots do follow on from each other, and they make far more sense if you read the whole thing. I wouldn't recomend reading them back to back, its a bit hard on the sanity.

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