At the end of The Vampire Lestat, Lestat, narrowly escaping an attack at his opening concert in San Francisco, was getting read to sleep during the day when a figure hovers over him. This book picks up immediately - Lestat narrates what happens in the days that follows. To do this, he backs out and we get third person POV from some sideline characters - Baby Jinx, a young vampire girl who is on her way to Lestat's concert; Khayman, a thousands-year old vampire just awakened; Daniel, the young interviewer from Interview with the Vampire; and Jessie, the young niece of a mysterious woman, Maharet, who gets involved in this paranormal agency, the Talamasca. Through these people, we see the rise of a dream of red-haired twins. Who are the twins and can they stop the destruction Akasha promises to enact - or will they help it?Rice's Vampire Chronicles has been a surprise to me - I thought, based on my impression of other (Anita Blake) early vampire novels, that I would hate these books. I was ready to give up on trying to get through "Interview", but I gave it one last shot - a shot that gave great payout as I adored that book. Surprisingly, I found I liked the sequel, "Lestat", just as much, if not more.I guess I shouldn't be surprised to stumble upon one of the books in the series that doesn't float my boat; nothing good lasts forever, right? But I really wanted to love this book. And unfortunately, I didn't.Before I get too much further, I want to set the record straight: I did NOT hate this book. In fact, I rather enjoyed myself at parts - when Lestat was narrating, for example, the new character, Baby Jinx, Lestat's exchange with Akasha over who should rule and the destruction of society as we know it, and the story of the red-haired twins. Very fascinating stuff. My problem isn't over the content - it's how it was presented. And how it was presented just didn't jive with me.One problem I think was that the story wasn't told from Lestat's first person POV. It's not a common thing to find first person done well, but Rice used it adeptly both in "Lestat" and "Interview", and when this book talks from Lestat in first person, it is again, superb. However, to show what is going on from people other than Lestat, Rice pulls out into a third person POV. It wasn't necessarily bad, it's just that most of the characters whose view we follow aren't particularly interesting or important to the story. As much as I liked Baby Jinx, for example, her story really didn't do much to further the plot. Same with Daniel, for the most part. And while Jessie does play a role in the story, did we really need to get into the details of her life? (OK, I'll be upfront: she was my least favorite character so I really got tired of reading about how awesome she was and how everything seemed to revolve around her.)Telling so many stories in the first two sections really hampered the pace. The first 50% or so is painfully slow as we follow several relatively new characters and the events that lead them up to Lestat's concert. Like I said above, some of their stories are integral; others are dubious. Me? I had trouble switching back and forth between all of them and found myself wondering why we were bothering.The second half is much, much better. We hear the story of the red-haired twins from one of the twins, Maharet. Her story also includes the origins of vampires and the eponymous "Queen of the Damned", Akasha. This portion was quite a bit more interesting - unfortunately, I found myself wandering at more than one point. I'm not sure why that is - was I getting bored of the Chronicles? Was I no longer in the mood for a slow, deliberate story? Part of me thinks that if this book had been 100% (or nearly) Maharet's story and POV, I would have liked it better.Maharet's story switches with Lestat's POV as Akasha tries to convince him to join her and her new world order. Again, this was pretty interesting stuff - and yet, I found myself getting bored again!! What is my problem??? Why wasn't I enjoying this as much as "Interview" and "Lestat"?!I don't quite know the answers to these questions; maybe the lack of enjoyment of this book is my fault. Maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind. Maybe I need a break from the Chronicles (I have read them nearly straight through at this point) so I can fully enjoy the mythos and surroundings, which continue to be top-notch. I feel bad I can't pinpoint it and even worse about not enjoying this book after my delight with reading the first two.No matter my feelings for this book, I will continue this series. It continues to have promise and be one of the best portrayals of vampires I've read. I'm just going to take a break so I can come back to this excited and interested in Lestat's mischievous schemes.
Lestat has rocked the vampire world with his music and his book revelations. But his voice has reached far more than he imagined – it has come to the ears of Akasha, the first vampire, the Queen of the Damned. For the first time in millennia, she has woken upAnd she has plans – plans for Lestat, plans for the world of vampires and plans for all humanity.It falls for a few ancient vampires to try and stop her as she unleashes carnage to realise her vision of what the world should be.This book is 460 pages long. And like every Anne Rice books I’ve read to date it could easily be half that or less. I cannot even begin to describe the amount of redundancy and repetition there is in this book.Usually when we get a character, the author will describe a bit about them, give some insight into their background and let the rest develop as the story progresses. Not Anne Rice. In these books we get a character and before they do anything even slightly relevant we have to have their life history. Not just their life history, but if we’re really lucky, we get their ancestry back 3 generations (at least) as well. It’s boring, it’s dull, it’s utterly irrelevant to anything resembling the plot.I can’t even say there’s much in the way of coherent plot here anyway. A large part of the book involves recapping the last book. We have the dreams of the twins that just serve to be ominous foreshadowing – but are repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated over and over. I really can’t stress how repetitive this book is – this same dream is recounted not just from multiple sources but then multiple times from each source. And this is a theme throughout the books, we have multiple sources all thinking about Lestat and his music – but all thinking exactly the same thing about Lestat and his music. So we get the same thing over and overAnd when people finally gather together their grand plan is EPIC EXPOSITION. Seriously, people being slaughtered, Askasha raging away and the gang gathers to have 2 solid nights of storytelling. The most long winded, repetitive story telling imaginable. Face the enemy with long winded folktales!Then there’s the characters – all of who’s point of view we are treated to in ridiculous length – most of which are utterly irrelevant. At least Louis and Gabrielle and Armand have some history in the story and we don’t see too much from their POV, they’re recognised as being spectators. But the rest? What exactly was the point of Khayman? He just kind of sat in a corner and was ineffably sad. But we got pages and pages from his POV. Jesse? What did Jesse actually do? What was the point of her? What was the relevance of her Great Family? But she was there, her POV, her chapters worth of backstory was dragged up, we roped in the Talamasca for more pages of pointlessness – because none of it was relevant. None of it added to the overall plot. None of it added to the ending. None of her history or story was really relevant. And Daniel – another character inserted with a painfully long backstory and history with Armand who, like Louis and Gabrielle and Armand and Jesse, ended up being nothing more than a spectator for the – and I use the term loosely – action. These characters are not part of the story, they’re spectators, it’s like stopping a play in the middle so we can hear the biography of Mrs. Jones in the 3rd row of the theatre. It doesn’t matter, I have no reason to care, it’s pure paddingRead More
What do You think about The Queen Of The Damned (1997)?
Ordinarily, for a book I enjoyed so much, I would give it five stars. The Legend of the Twins was actually my favorite story arc in Queen of the Damned, and the Twins are two of my favorite characters. Infact, I'd say that this book is my favorite in the entire Vampire Chronicles.But the reason I take away a star is due to the abrupt ending. It is clear that Akasha is deluded in her thinking, and that what she believes is good for mankind is not. But I wonder after 6000 years of sleep, she would have the wisdom to see a better path, unless these 6000 years spent in silence (except for exceedingly rare occasions) served to warp and twist her mind. This in itself is an entirely believable character.However, the very ending left me flat. I had to read the last chapter several times to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. I wish that Ms. Rice had put more of Mekare in future books, perhaps learning about modern society and getting used to her new role as Queen. The ending was far too abrupt and not well-thought out for a tale that was incredible.
—Delicious Strawberry
I liked it well enough. There was a lot of skipping around. There was a lot of poetry in the beginnings of chapters written by "Stan Rice" who I assume is Anne's husband? I just skipped over all of that.There was a lot in the book that I thought was superfluous. Such as the story of Baby Jenks. It was merely an obstacle in my path to finding out about Akasha and the truth to the beginnings of all of Anne Rice's vampires. I liked the stories that involved Jesse and I liked the stories that involved Khayman. Khayman's story actually made me laugh as he sought to entertain himself by dressing up in the stereotypical outfits and such. The best part of the whole book was The Legend of the Twins. Anne Rice provoked my interest with the dreams. At first I had no idea what they meant, but I knew they had to be about the beginning. She teased me with these dreams being shared by all of the vampires whose stories we read in Queen of the Damned. And finally she gave them to me. But she gave them to me in parts. She interrupted the story of the Twins with Lestat and Akasha's adventures which were boring. Although I quite like how Akasha thinks. I like her grand design for the future and the reason she awoke. I was sad to see about her end, but I knew it was coming. Overall it was enjoyable. I put it down several times and picked it back up within only a matter of days. It was by no means as good as the previous two books -- Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat... but it did give us more insight into the character of Lestat which was a driving force for me. I quite like the character of Lestat. Do I recommend the book? If you like the series, if you liked the characters from the previous books... yes. It is an integral piece of the story and is an insight further into the minds of each of the vampires of Anne Rice's world. It is the story of how all vampires from this universe came to be and is therefore an important read if you loved this universe. But be aware that it has some serious downtime.
—Heather
Much better then "Interview With the Vampire" This combined with "The Vampire Lestat" forms the best part of the Vampire Chronicles series and details the core mythos of Anne Rice’s vampires. In this book unlike the others in this series there are several narrators all with very interesting view points who each tell their own part of the story until the plot lines converge. If you intend to read any of Anne Rice’s Vampire novels (except possibly "Interview") make sure you read these first and are not trying to figure things out based on what you read in "Interview", Louis knows so little and his perspective is so skewed that he doesn't provide a very good introduction to this world. At least that's the literary version, in truth I suppose that Anne Rice hadn't made all of the world building decisions she needed to make yet and changed her mind on several points as well when she decided to take the vampires concept and run with it.
—Daniel McGill
