About the Book
World Fantasy Award nominee 1986.
Returning to the hypnotic world she so brilliantly created in Interview with the Vampire,
Anne Rice demonstrates once again her power to enthrall. With the same
richness of drama, atmosphere and incident, she tells the fantastic
story of the vampire Lestat, whom we first perceived as the seductive
devil-vampire of Interview with the Vampire and whom we now
follow through the ages as he searches for the origin and meaning of
his own dark immortality. And who, more and more, engages our sympathy
until he stands revealed as a questing romantic, a vampire-hero with
his own strange and passionate courage and morality.
As the
novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five
years' sleep, and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself
in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of
millions. And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire
oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the
generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the
riddle of his own existence.
As he speaks we are plunged back
into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young
Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at
odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling
troupe of actors. We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first
apprentice at a boulevard theater, then its most celebrated actor,
idolized, adored by many and – night after night – watched by one...
until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy,
he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally
joined to the unholy brotherhood.
We follow Lestat as he
searches for others like him – in churches and brothels, in gambling
houses, huts and palaces – sometimes joined by the vampire-angel
Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes
traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty
are equally transcendent. We follow Lestat as he travels from the
snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient
Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins,
sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing
always that the central truth eludes him.
But all the while,
throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has
made enemies among his brethren – vampires who are in terror of his
questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they
exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to
rule. And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a
sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very
first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is
at last revealed. Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are
irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning
climax, Lestat's vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic
freeways of the twentieth century.
