The returning characters are all on top form and further developed. Rice includes pretty much everyone we’ve met over the course of the novels, and we catch up with them and learn of more connections and shared histories. We learn that certain things happen, but we’re not given any in-depth recounting of the conflicts between the First Brood and the Queen’s Blood. The new characters are introduced well, and we learn a lot more about the early years of Akasha’s reign of terror - well, sort of. This had the potential to be a disaster, but she pulls it off with aplomb. This was certainly a strength of the novel, but it also felt like Rice was massively expanding the mythology and scope of the world she’s created. In some ways, one could see this as the novel fans of the first five novels have been waiting for.Įven though Lestat is very much at the centre of the story - where else could he be, really? - Rice also gives us mini-biographies of a host of new characters. This, I think, was a smart move - many readers were disappointed with the series post- Tale of the Body Thief (although I enjoyed Memnoch the Devil just as much). However, in many ways Prince Lestat felt far more like a direct continuation of the story in The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned - it has the same, milennia-sweeping scope, and is as much about the characters in the past as it is in the present. It has been 11 years since Blood Canticle, the previous novel in the series. An ambitious expansion of the existing mythology, and an engrossing update to the lives of Lestat and the undead tribe. It was with considerable anticipation, then, that I started this long-awaited new novel. I have, of course, also read the other novels in the Vampire Chronicles. Will the dazzling hero-wanderer, the dangerous rebel-outlaw Lestat heed the call to unite the Children of Darkness as they face this new twilight?įew novels have had as much of a lasting impression on me as Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned. There is only one vampire, only one blood drinker, truly known to the entire world of the Undead. Who – or what – is the Voice? What does it desire, and why? Immolations, huge massacres, have commenced all over the world. Roused from their earth-bound slumber, ancient ones are in thrall to the Voice: which commands that they burn fledgling vampires in cities from Paris to Mumbai, Hong Kong to Kyoto and San Francisco. The vampire world is in crisis – their kind have been proliferating out of control and, thanks to technologies undreamed of in previous centuries, they can communicate as never before.

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