Queen of the Damned

If you haven't read the Anne Rice vampire chronicles, well it's not for everyone.  But it is for me!  I've finished the first three books in the series, as mentioned in my last post, and each one with the feeling that I've gone through everything the characters have gone through.  I finish the last page with a breath of relief and at the same time a longing for the story that was just told.  I'm even tempted to check archaeological records and see if people really did start farming just to have their own little psychedelic-drug collections for an easy trip!

 

And longing is no stranger to Anne Rice's characters... this, the third book in the series, continues in Lestat's voice where he left off in The Vampire Lestat:  the Queen has awoken for better or for worse and we find out what she has in store not only for Lestat and his bloodsucking friends, but for the world.  The story begins in the present and ends in the past, taking us through a web of families, vampire and human, various versions of a fascinating mythology and creation story of the vampire, new old vampires as introduced to the readers along with their own tortuous pasts - all held together by the Beginning, here known as the Legend of the Twins.  What is the Legend of the Twins?  Well, you have to read to find out, I can't tell you.

This was clearly the most painstaking of the vampire chronicles so far, as Anne Rice pulls together the stories of so many to form a cohesive truth of the Beginning, and finally brings us to a deeply felt climax as the events from the second novel explode, leaving Lestat and the others to clean up what mess they unknowingly started in the first two novels.  The end sees everyone together, the ultimate showdown to stop evil in its tracks and all must decide what the world has become to them all - a feed farm for vampires, a human nightmare that must be put to rest, or a beacon of hope for humans and vampires past and yet to come.

While I'm not sure Queen of the Damned is my favorite in the chronicles so far, I did enjoy the various threads woven together and the takes on the mythology/truth of the vampire and the prehistory included to tell this tale.  The vampires are very humanized in this book, and it's definitely no secret here that Anne Rice intended the vampire struggle to act as metaphor for Christianity and the human struggle with faith in good and evil, and in the world we live in.  The suspense of the ever-unfolding Story of the Twins pushes the book along and it's about half-way through that you refuse to put the book down until you know what's up with these twins and what the heck that has to do with the Queen.  Highly recommended, even more highly if you've read The Vampire Lestat, which is also a must-read for vampire lovers.

And with that I leave you guessing and reading, so I can continue Charlaine Harris' Dead Until Dark, the first in the Sookie Stackhouse series.  No, I haven't seen True Blood yet and while the TV show can't be as good as the books, I do plan to catch it later this year - after reading the series of course.  So don't go anywhere, the next review will reach you in no time!