Anne Rice

Back when I lived at home, my father used to read a lot. He had (still has, for that matter) hundreds of books. I used to browse his bookshelves to find books that looked interesting. That's where I found The Mummy or Ramses the Damned. I read that book and immediately went to the library to find more books by Anne Rice. At the library, I discovered The Vampire Chronicles. I read Interview with the Vampire, and almost never read another Anne Rice novel. The story was great, but I just didn't enjoy the writing style of writing the book like it was an interview between a reporter and a vampire. I don't know why, but that writing style really disturbed me. But I liked the storyline so much, that I decided to give The Vampire Lestat a chance, anyway. Good thing I did, because I liked it almost as much at The Mummy or Ramses the Damned. In fact, of all the Anne Rice novels I have read, Interview with the Vampire is the only book that I had any problems with. My favorite is still The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (man, typing that gets old), but The Mayfair Witches (as well as the rest ofThe Vampire Chronicles) were also excellent books that were very hard to put down.

The official Anne Rice website is located at www.AnneRice.com.

Books I've Read by Anne Rice

Ramses the Great has awakened in Edwardian London. Having drunk the elixir of life, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied. Although he pursues voluptuous aristocrat Julie Stratford, the woman for whom he desperately longs is Cleopatra. And his intense longing for her, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger . . . . (book description)

The Vampire Chronicles

• The Vampire Chronicles (Book consists of first 4 novels)

  For the first time you can find all your favorite night-stalking, blood-guzzling undead--Lestat, Claudia, Louis, Akasha, Armand, and Memnoch--all in the same place at the same time. Here, collected in one box-set, are the four bestselling, original titles of Anne Rice's sprawling vampire series. (Amazon.com description)

  1. Interview with the Vampire

     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. (book description)

  2. The Vampire Lestat

     Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now Lestat is a rockstar in the demonic, shimmering 1980s. He rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his terrifying exsitence. His story, the second volume in Anne Rice's best-selling Vampire Chronicles, is mesmerizing, passionate, and thrilling. (book description)

  3. The Queen of the Damned

     A 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. (book description)

  4. The Tale of the Body Thief

     For 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 . . . . (book description)

5. (I haven't read this book, yet) Memnoch the Devil

   In Anne Rice's extraordinary new novel, the Vampire Lestat--outsider, 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 adversaries he has yet known. He is snatched from the world itself by the mysterious Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil. He is taken like the ancient prophets into the heavenly realm and is usherd 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, Ann Rice summoned up for us worlds that are fantastic and distant, making them as resonant, real, and immediate as our own. Now, in 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. (book description)

6. (I haven't read this book, yet) The Vampire Armand (Mass Market Paperback) or (Hardcover edition)

   In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand--eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. Armand, who first appeared in all his dark glory more than twenty years ago in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire, the first of The Vampire Chronicles, the novel that established its author worldwide as a magnificent storyteller and creator of magical realms. Now, we go with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood--a ruined city under Mongol dominion--and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood. As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul. (book description)

7. (I haven't read this book, yet) Merrick (Paperback edition) or (Hardcover edition)

   In her mesmerizing new novel, the author of The Vampire Chronicles and the saga of the Mayfair Withces demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magice. Here, in a magnificent tale of sorcery and the occult, she makes real for us a hitherto unexplored world of witchcraft. At the center is the beautiful, unconquerable witch Merrick. She is a decendant of the gens de couleur libres, a society of New Orleans octoroons and quadroons steeped in the lore and ceremony of voodoo, who reigned in the shadowy world where African and French--the dark and the white--intermingled. Her ancestors are the great Mayfair Witches, of whom she knows nothing--and from whom she inherits the power and the magical knowledge of a Circe. Into this exotic realm comes David Talbot--hero, storyteller, adventurer, almost-mortal vampire, visitor from another dark realm. It is he who recounts Merrick's haunting tale--a tale that takes us from the New Orleans of past and present to the jungles of Guatemala, from the Maya ruins of a century ago to ancient civilizations not yet explored. Anne Rice's richly told novel weaves an irresistible story of two worlds: the witches' world and the vampires' world, where magical powers and otherworldly fascinations are locked together in a dance of seduction, death, and rebirth. (book description)

8. Blood and Gold (Paperback edition) or (Hardcover edition)

   Out of the pages of The Vampire Chronicles steps the golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millenia, once mentor to the Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious slayer of the evildoer, and now ready to reveal the secrets of his two-thousand-year-long existence in his own intense yet intimate voice. Born in Imperial Rome, imprisoned and made a "blood god" by the ancient Druids, Marius is the baffled yet powerful protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the race resides. We follow him through his tragic loss of the vampire Pandora, his lover and fledgling creation. Through him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Christendom of Constantine, and the sack of the Eternal City by the Visigoths. We see him sailing to the glittering city of Constantinople. Worlds within worlds unfold as Marius, surviving the Dark Ages and the Black Death, emerges in the midst of the Italian Renaissance to create magnificent paintings and a vampire—the boy Armand. Moving from Florence, Venice, Dresden, Paris, and the English castle of the secret and scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel reaches its dramatic finale in a jungle paradise where the oldest of the vampires reigns supreme. (book description)

9. (I haven't read this book, yet) Blackwood Farm (Paperback edition) or (Roughcut edition)

   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. (book description)

10. (I haven't read this book, yet) Blood Canticle (Mass Market Paperback) or (Hardcover edition)

    Anne Rice continues her astonishing Vampire Chronicles in a new novel that begins where Blackwood Farm left 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 with Memnoch 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 Canticle is Anne Rice at her finest. (book description)

The Mayfair Witches

1. The Witching Hour

   Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding stoyrtelling, Anne Rice makes real a family of witches--a family given to poetry and incest, to murder and philsophy, a family that is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous and seductive being. (book description)

2. Lasher

   "SEDUCTIVE MAGIC...SPELLBINDING...Rice stages her scenes in a wide variety of times and locales, tapping deeply into the richest veins of mythology and history." --San Francisco Chronicle "STEAMY...FAST-PACED AND HUGELY ENGROSSING...Rice's title character--a seductive, evil, highly sexual and ultimately tragic creature--is fascinating." --The Miami Herald "BEHIND ALL THE VELVET DRAPES AND GOSSAMER WINDING SHEETS, THIS IS AN OLD-FASHIONED FAMILY SAGA....Rice's descriptive writing is so opulent it almost begs to be read by candlelight." --The Washington Post Book World "RICE SEES THINGS ON A GRAND SCALE...There is a wide-screen historical sweep to the tale as it moves from one generation of witches to the other." --The Boston Globe "EROTIC...EERIE...HORRIFYING...A tight tale of the occult in present-day New Orleans...Anne Rice is a spellbinding novelist.... LASHER quenches." --Denver Post A MAIN SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD© (book description)

3. Taltos

   "ANNE RICE WILL LIVE ON THROUGH THE AGES OF LITERATURE." --San Francisco Chronicle "TALTOS IS THE THIRD BOOK IN A SERIES KNOWN AS THE LIVES OF THE MAYFAIR WITCHES . . . Their haunted heritage has brought the family great wealth, which is exercised from a New Orleans manse with Southern gentility; but of course such power cannot escape notice . . . or challenge. . . Rice is a formidable talent. . . [Taltos] is a curious amalgam of gothic, glamour fiction, alternate history, and high soap opera." --The Washington Post Book World "AN INTRICATE, STUNNING IMAGINATION." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "SPELLBINDING . . . MYTHICAL . . . Anne Rice is a pure storyteller." --Cosmopolitan "BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN." --Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Her power of invention seems boundless. . . . She has made a masterpiece of the morbid, worthy of Poe's daughter. . . . It is hard to praise sufficiently the originality of Miss Rice." --The Wall Street Journal (book description)