When I bought The Vampire Lestat I was so excited about the prospect of reading it, I rushed through the 8 or so books I still had waiting in line to read. I shouldn't have bothered. I spent more time trying to get the book finished than I did enjoying what I was reading.
Having adored Interview with the Vampire on many occasions, I was surprised to find the second novel in The Vampure Chronicles dry and full of uninteresting history.
It began promisingly enough, Lestat risen after many years in the earth to find a new technological age that brought an interesting twist to the blood sucking tradition, but as I journeyed back to the very beginning of Lestat's vampiric life I began to have my suspicions. This did not seem at all like the Lestat I had known in IWTV! Now being fully aware that Louis' version of the story may have sounded very different to the real Lestat, I gave him the benefit of the doubt - I tried, I really did.
Unfortunately after the fifth digression into someone elses history - history spanning the entire existence of vampires on the earth - I began to feel a little weary. Anne Rice was dragging me around centuries and continents in a desperate attempt to tell the story of a life that had not in fact beeen all that interesting. It seems she began by telling a life story and proceeded to let the story take her over; no sooner had Lestat met his oldest vampire, than it seemed Rice was possessed by the desire to tell the complete and unabridged story of vampires in 200 or so pages.
I wanted the story of Lestat's life, what I got was a potted history of vampires in a fiction novel. The novel should have called itself 'Where Vampires Began' and it possibly would have sold more copies; it might even have had a film made of it.
I found the characters so two dimensional that I could have pushed them over with my little finger. Much as I wanted - and believe me I did - to believe in the world Rice was creating for me, I couldn't quite allow myself to enter into it without losing my grip on reality as we know it. The leap was too large, from my comfy sofa to blood suckers that transform their mothers and take her as a lover because apparently 'that's ok now.'.
To top it all off, Marius destroying vampires in balls of flame? Well really! I like my vampires to be believable. Often we read vampiric stories to allay the fears we all have of the unknown, the alien, the uncanny and the sublime; in this novel all my worst fears were realised when I couldn't even trust in what I was reading!
Anne Rice has started a novel and allowed it to turn in to an epic dynasty that eventually got out of control. A bitterly disappointing couple of weeks and I finish it with my faith in all things strange dangerously shaken.
Bring on Queen of the Dammned!
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