A stunning departure, a surprising and compelling return…From Anne Rice, perennial best seller, single-handed reinventor of the vampire cosmology–a new, exhilarating novel, a deepening of her vampire mythology, and a chillingly hypnotic mystery-thriller.
“What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now
contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and
again…” –from The Vampire Lestat
Rice once again summons up the irresistible spirit-world of the oldest and most powerful forces of the night, invisible beings unleashed on an unsuspecting world able to take blood from humans, in a long-awaited return to the extraordinary world of the Vampire Chronicles and the uniquely seductive Queen of the Damned (“mesmerizing” –San Francisco Chronicle), a long-awaited novel that picks up where The Vampire Lestat (“brilliant…its undead characters are utterly alive” –New York Times) left off more than a quarter of a century ago to create an extraordinary new world of spirits and forces–the characters, legend, and lore of all the Vampire Chronicles.
The novel opens with the vampire world in crisis…vampires have been proliferating out of control; burnings have commenced all over the world, huge massacres similar to those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned…Old vampires, roused from slumber in the earth are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn vampire-mavericks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco.
As the novel moves from present-day New York and the West Coast to ancient Egypt, fourth century Carthage, 14th-century Rome, the Venice of the Renaissance, the worlds and beings of all the Vampire Chronicles-Louis de Pointe du Lac; the eternally young Armand, whose face is that of a Boticelli angel; Mekare and Maharet, Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true Child of the Millennia; along with all the other new seductive, supernatural creatures-come together in this large, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious novel to ultimately rise up and seek out who-or what-the Voice is, and to discover the secret of what it desires and why…
And, at the book’s center, the seemingly absent, curiously missing hero-wanderer, the dazzling, dangerous rebel-outlaw–the great hope of the Undead, the dazzling Prince Lestat…
From the Hardcover edition.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2014: Over a decade since the last installment of the Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice’s Prince Lestat reignites the love affair with the quixotic nosferatu who inspired writers, readers and Hollywood filmmakers. The newly resurrected, but no less rebellious, Lestat addresses a mysterious twenty-first century vampire genocide with the same panache, self-absorption, and drama readers have come to know and love. Rice masterfully populates the present-day storyline with a cast of characters from her previous novels along with new blood, so to speak, and reading this book is like seeing old friends whom you’d sort of forgotten about, but are thrilled to meet again—even if you are reading about them for the first time. Prince Lestat raises interesting questions about the boundaries of science, conflicting beliefs, and a universal need to belong; a welcome return to a narrative that spawned an entire subgenre of fiction. –Seira Wilson
