Books About Vampires

[driftwood]

the palace by chelsea quinn yarbo - historical vampire novel, set on 15th century italy. try it.

[Alexei]

Hello! Could you please develop this thought? I'm writing my phd project on Interview with the Vampire and I'm very interested in other people's opinions about it, even though they're not positive. Thank you!

I am reading "Interview with the vampire" now. I have read "The vampire Lestat" and "Queen of the damned" before, so the first think that impressed me was how different are these books; not only the point of view showing us Lestat but everything. The style of writing is a bit different too. In general I like Anne Rice's novels. Actually I don't really like her style of writing, but when it comes to vampires I become surprisingly modest. I like her stories and the way her vampires see reality. It is interesting to see how someone who loves life is living it since he has become a dead man forever.
As for the other vampire books… I don’t really like “Dracula” it is too much melodramatic, there are too much garlic and crucifix. But I love the style of Bram Stoker. It is so good prose. I like the idea with journals; it is really confusing sometimes, so it is in the line of gothic horror novels. And they are very good – everything is so beautiful and gloomy in the same way. Everything is a bit sinister and veiled with mystery and fear. “The Historian” is one of my favorite vampire books, so I recommended it warmly.

[the Last 13]

although I havn't finished the series yet I enjoy it enough to mention it....

Vampire Hunter D.......they have been translated from Japanese to english

Salems Lot.......good story....but I tend to think he drags on about stuff much like Anne Rice .....

Anne Rice .....great writing creates the characters and settings like nothing... but she drags on about it all .....she takes pages to tell us what they saw....and how they saw it....what they feel and how they feel.....but never are both done simaltaneously/ or well enough to convey anything....she leaves too much incomplete in her writing ...which is funny when I honestly think she could've afforded to lose a page here or there...

[Alexei]

although I havn't finished the series yet I enjoy it enough to mention it....

Vampire Hunter D.......they have been translated from Japanese to english

I didn't there is a book! Or you talk about the manga? I myself like the "Hellsing" manga. It is great!

[liesl]

“The Historian” is one of my favorite vampire books, so I recommended it warmly.

i read that book over christmas but sadly couldn't get enough into it to connect with the characters or enjoy the plot. It seemed to drag to me so unfortunately i could not recommend it. I certainly agree with the earlier comments that the book was resolved suddenly after being very drawn out.

As for Anne Rice i have read 'Interview with the Vampire', 'Queen of the Damned', 'The Vampire Lestat', 'Blood and Gold', 'Violin', 'Pandora', 'The Vampire Armand' and 'Vittorio the Vampire'. My favourite was 'The Vampire Armand' purely because i like this character more than the others. I would recommend all but as for me i lost the enjoyment of her style of writing after reading so much of her work, after a while it all began to seem similar and i simply became bored of her way or writing.

[Alexei]

Oh, I love Armand too. However her new books are not so good as her oldests \I mean the first three of them).

[Bastet]

Oh, I love Armand too. However her new books are not so good as her oldests \I mean the first three of them).

Well, if I'm not mistaken, it was the first trilogy which called the readers and the critics' attention... and the fact that those were the books she had written when the movie Interview with the Vampire came out, right?

I'm trying to read them chronologically and I must say that I've only gotten to The Tale of the Body Thief (the fourth in the Chronicles), since I had to read Interview with the Vampire so many times for the PhD project. I liked The Tale, but there came a point when I was thinking the character of Lestat, although still retaining his characteristic charm, was getting "a little out of hand", even not so as much as in The Queen of the Damned. I liked the more realistic style (if any realism is possible when speaking of vampires) of the first two novels (Interview and The Vampire Lestat).

[Alexei]

Oh, there are so many differences between the first trilogy and other books. In another forum, dedicated to her vampires, one of the members has made a list of them. I shall ask her for her permission to post it here and I shall post it if she don't mind.

[Bastet]

Thanks Alexei, that would be great to read!

[truth_forest]

I've only ever read two books about vampires - Dracula and Interview with the Vampire.

However, I ended up really regretting reading Interview with the Vampire. It was very disappointing.

I've never read Interview with the Vampire. I just watched the movie that I really love it, although my friend told that it's a gay film.
Do you think it's Gay?

[kathycf]

I don't think the movie is aimed at a gay audience, per se, but certainly there are some undercurrents of homosexuality in there, more so in the book. Even with our culture being more open minded about homosexuality, I think it would be very uncommon for mainstream Hollywood actors and film makers to make a film aimed soley at a gay audience.

Without even delving into the whole Lestat/Louis relationship, you can read between the lines when Rice writes about the relationship between Louis and Armand.

People sometimes say something is "gay" if they want to denigrate it, which I feel is not a very nice thing to do. (Of course, I am not implying that is what your friend's intention was.)

[Alexei]

"Look at the differences...

Early Lestat: Wept for witches burt at the stake becaue Church and state were connected making religious fears into laws.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he says chuch and state should not be seperated.

Early Lestat: (Memnoch The Devil) Lost his left eye
Later Lestat: (Blood Canticle / Blackwood Farm) It's his right eye...

Early Lestat: Helped create what is today Goth Culture.
Later Lestat: Following Goth trend and even refers to himself as a Goth... So much for his individuality and unwillingness to conform.

Early Lestat: Speaks like a cross between Sam Spade and a flatboatman in 1984
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he speaks like a Ninja Turtle...

Early Lestat: Food is poison to him.
Later Lestat: In Blackwood Farm he eats a communion wafer.

Early Lestat: Wanted to be a teaching brother but never really believed God was in those halls but rather believed in the goodness of the men there and the cleansliness and order of the place.
Later Lestat: Wants to be a Saint for religious reasions instead of actual ethical ones...

Early Lestat: Questioned everything.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle said The Pope can never be wrong. And this is odd because he represents Anne Rice's beliefs and The Pope is against gay marriage, Anne is pro-gay marriage. There have been Popes who said all Jewish people are evil and that the crucades were good and Mary Magdoline was a prostitute (The vatican only recenlty corrected this last one but a lot of people don't even know that she was only possessed of seven demons, not a prostitute.

Early Lestat: wrote on a computer word processor and hacked into a police data base in Tale of the body thief.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he is afraid of computers and doesn't know how to send an E-mail.

Early Lestat: loved how people walk almost naked in the Southrn heat. And was basically a slut.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he chastises Mona for being slutty.

Early Lestat: was a rock star
Later Lestat: sang a country song composed by a homophobe and is a Dixie Chicks fan...

Early Lestat: was in love with a woman from Washington named Gretchen and a New Yorker named Dora and never spoke as humans as divided into races.
Later Lestat: says only Southerners know how to treat blacks and yankees are all racist (So I guess being black means you're not Southern or Northern?)

Early Lestat: 'Tell me how bad I am, it makes me feel so good.'
Later Lestat: 'I want to be a saint.' and 'I DON'T WANT TO BE BAD ANYMORE!'

Early Lestat: Felt pity even for Armand. (It's why he didn't decapitate him in The Vampire Lestat)
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he shouts at Mona to get off his property when she starts crying after a fight with him.

Early Lestat: Wept for people like Baby Jenks
Later Lestat: Not only kills his own kind that love him but even those that beg for their lives.

Early Lestat: Rogue and rule breaker
Later Lestat: Kills rogues and rule breakers

Early Lestat: Started poor and was content that way and know artists and musicians and actors who were poor, they were his friends.
Later Lestat: Considers poor people, and those in 'trailer parks' to be the bottom of the latter in humanity...

Early Lestat: A rock super star who publishes books.
Later Lestat: Forbids quinn from buiilding a website because of the exposure risk. (Uh, huh...)

Early Lestat: Fed on murderers who feel no remorse.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he is in love with Rowan who murdered her daughter who had been saving her life and still wants a live version of her daugher's species to dissect.

Early Lestat: Acts impulsively.
Later Lestat: Won't make Rowan a vampire because he is patient and it's 'wrong' when she has work that must be done as a mortal...

Early Lestat: Didn't mind his mother dressing as a man.
Later Lestat: Seems to hate it and apparently condemned her for it in The Vampire Lestat according to Mona. Umm... Where?

Early Lestat: Saw optimisn in a secular age of innocence and himself as an unnecessary evil in the world wanting to be good.
Later Lestat: Sees evil everywhere but in himself. (Frollo from Hunchback of NotreDame anyone?)

Early Lestat: was 'innocent' for his lack of forced beliefs that he did not use distorted truths to reinforce. - paraphrasing Marius
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he subscribed to a Catholic news letter and says The Pope is infailable.

Early Lestat: Believed in The Savage Garden
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle he renounces The Savage Garden and only believes in the maker.

Early Lestat: Said nothing justifies the suffering of a child
Later Lestat: Actually implied that Roger in Memnoch The Devil, when just a child, should have let The old captain have his way with him sexually.

Early Lestat: Remembered his mortal life viviedly and told us his first kill was the old man in Magnus's castle.
Later Lestat: It seems that, according to Memnoch, as a mortal he killed someone in a bar fight. Now considering Lestat's obsession with death when he was mortal wouldn't he have told us about this if it was true?

Early Lestat: In The Vampire Lestat he lost is virginity to an actress when he ran away with the troupe before his brothers dragged him home. Then he became anti-social until he met Nicki.
Later Lestat: In Memnoch The Devil he claimed that fathers came to the castle complaining that he got their daughters pregnant. Would Lestat really be indifferent to getting someone pregnant when he was concerned he might have gotten the waitress pregnant in Tale of the body thief? Seriously, with his obsession with goodness and the value of life that doesn't sound like him.

Early Lestat: Wanted to be an actor.
Later Lestat: In Blood Canticle has embraced a religion that condemns the theatre as being tained by The Devil.

It seems to me he lost the better faith, the faith in humanity and goodness and gained something cold and actually fundimentally meaningless. It also seems to me that what I'm discribing are direct opposites of character nature."

This is part of the list I have promised.
NB! IT IS NOT MADE BY ME!!! I want to Tatsel from the English forum in the Lestat's Savage GArden website. lestat.de.lioncourt1.free.fr/lestat.html

[Alexei]

Here is the second part of the list! It is also made by Tatsel.

"Recent mistakes in The Vampire Chronicles that I've noticed:

1. In The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the damned it's claimed that Marius' big mistake was making Armand a vampire before he was an adult, that he had done it because he was too impatient and felt terrible about it. But in The vampire Armand novel it's obvious that he had no other choice or Armand would have died from poisoning. Would he have rather Armand died than make him young? If it was to save his life why did he react as if he had done it out of impatience?
Also, Armand made it very clear to Lestat that Marius never, ever laid a hand on him to hurt him so what was with all those whipping scenes? Anne Rice only wrote that for those who could not bear the boy-vampire burning himself in Memnoch The Devil. He was dead and gone (Not that I hold much validity for the chronicles after the third installment). She only wrote that because people complained about him dying. She, herself,
never liked Armand. And the novel still doesn't explain how or why he lived.

2. The Vampire Companion book and any Vampire Chronicle after The Queen of the damned says that Lestat was either nineteen or twenty when he became a vampire. This cannot be possible because on the first page of The Early education and Adventures of The Vampire Lestat he says that it was the winter of his twenty-first-year that he went out to kill the wolves. A year later he goes to Paris and he stays there for about a year before he is forcibly made in a vampire. He should be at least twenty-three, not nineteen or twenty, which is actually younger than the year he went to kill the wolves. And there are some young Anne Rice fans who insist he was twenty because they'd rather he had been closer to their age and tell me that the twenty-first year could have been age twenty, it's his first year as a twenty-year-old, even if I humour this, he'd had to have been at least twenty-one when he was made a vampire.
But under the assumption that he was twenty-one when he went to kill the wolves,
he'd be around twenty-three. The only explanation is that Lestat himself is rounding down.

3. In Memnoch The Devil it was Lestat's left eye that got ripped out and was then given back. (Trust me, this is not something I'd forget or get confused- Believe me.) In Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle Anne says it's his right eye. The only explanation for this would be that Quinn has no sense of left or right and Lestat's extremely forgetful.

4. Pandora was nearly catatonic at the end of The Queen of the damned and by Pandora she's completely all right without any explaination as to what might have drawn her back to reality.

5. In Blackwood Farm Lestat, Quinn and Merrick all take a communion wafer and really do eat it. But it's supposed to be such a small amount of food that it doesn't effect them because it dissolves in the mouth. All food is supposed to be poison to a vampire. If because the food dissolves in the mouth it can be digested by Anne Rice's vampires all of a sudden that means they can eat chocolate, cream of wheat, life savers, altoids, and should be able to drink normal beverages, which contradicts all of her mythology. I don't care if the wafer is supposed to represent the body of Christ. It's not really magick. The Vampire Lestat novel tells us this. It's still just a wafer and therefor should be indigestible to the vampires.

6. The vampire's are becoming too saintly. Lestat's been through Heaven and Hell and all of creation, or at least the character thinks he has, we're supposed to assume he has and trust it. And Vittorio sees angels. Vittorio reminds me of the little boy in The Sixth sense. 'I see dead people. This isn't exactly a mistake but with all the spiritual content the angst from the vampire's uncertainty about the fabric of reality and the nature of good and evil his horribly compromised. A certain human-ness is gone. Anyway, didn't Anne hint once that she wanted to do a story where the government or a laboratory might learn about The vampires and capture them and try to figure them out or worse. That could have been a good novel, maybe even more believable than Memnoch The Devil. The novels are just getting too spiritual and history orientated and not so much story orientated. And People are now just buying them, no matter what happens in them, just because it has Anne
Rice's name attached to them and out of loyalty they feel they should love them, especially if Anne Rice says that Memnoch The Devil is her greatest work and that she is no longer happy with what she had done with The Queen of the damned- even though that novel had explained what happened in The Vampire Lestat, it told what became of the boy reporter, it united all the vampires, it explained where The vampires came from and it introduced The Talamasca- all and all I'd say that's pretty damned good!

7. Anne now said that Lestat's eyes were violet in Blackwood Farm, in Blood Canticle they're electric blue, in The vampire Lestat they're gray-blue. I wish she'd make up her mind and acknowledge these are different colours. Originally they were gray-blue and reflected violet very easily. This is mentioned on the very first page of The Vampire Lestat novel.

8. In Blackwood Farm, Quinn is terrified of Lestat because supposedly Lestat has been haunting New Orleans and killing all rogue fledglings he comes across. That was Armand, not Lestat. But somehow in The book Merrick Armand persuaded Lestat this must be done. Lestat must kill the rogues and rule breakers. Umm... He IS a rogue and rule breaker.
I'm aware that Armand (an annoyingly contrary and vicious boy-vampire) convinced Lestat that he must kill the rogue vampires in the novel Merrick but it makes no sense that Lestat would ever be convinced of anything by Armand! If you know anything of their history this would be obvious. Also Lestat's killing rogues and rule breakers, those who break his rules. It's an hypocrisy! He is a rogue and rule breaker! This is the vampire who wept for Baby Jenks, of all people (a vicious and extremely ignorant young vampire who gets killed in the novel The Queen of the damned), and yet now in The novel Blood
Canticle, Lestat just killed a handful of fledglings who LITERALLY worship him! That's not Lestat! And he's grown cold. When Mona asked him 'What if they beg for their lives?' he replied with 'They usually do.' Lestat used to at least have some compassion for his own. He's spared Armand's life and he's done a little of a lot worse than any of these rogues. We're talking about the ultimate rogue and rule breaker killing rogues and rule breakers!
Doesn't Anne Rice see the hypicricy here? Lestat's the one who wept for Baby Jenks of
all people...
And let's not forget that in Memnoch The Devil Lestat vowed never to raise a hand to anyone, human or vampire ever again.

9. In The Vampire Armand novel, Armand claims that he tried to 'help' Claudia by sewing her head on to the body of an adult female vampire. Is Armand really supposed to be that unintelligent that he'd think a tiny four-year-old head, sewn on to an adult body with black thread like a Frankenstein doll would be better than being trapped as a child? If he had done it it would have only been out of cruelty. Also in Interview with The vampire Louis saw
Claudia's body. Armand did say he had put the head back before burning her so
Louis never knew what he had done but Louis said her body was just like
charcoal, he'd have noticed if the head had been removed and put back, wouldn't he? If
Armand had so badly wounded Claudia she would not have been able to have
clutched to Madeline as she died the way she had. Being as weak as Claudia was, she
would have needed the time to heal to even move.

[Alexei]

The part three. It is too long for only one post!

"10 That's another little inconsistancy of Anne Rice's. Decapitation CAN kill a vampire. Ignoring the fact that Akasha was dying when she was decapitated and the only thing that saved the vampires was Mekare eating her heart and brain as the vampires wilted and lost consciousness around her- Anne Rice now has it (since The vampire Armand) that a vampire's decapitated head can be reatatched IF it's put back in place within a few seconds of it being removed. After all, a human head lives five seconds after it's chopped off. So I guess she twisted this scientific knowledge for vampire physiology. But seriously, could Armand sew a head onto a body in under five seconds? Seriously. That's a delicate opporation, even with preternatural speed, sewing flesh. She seriously goofed with this nonsense. Armand could not have conducted his experiment on Claudia in The Vampire Armand.

11. Armand could never have done the 'sewing Claudia's head on to an adult body that he discribes in The Vampire Armand. Louis, Madeline and Claudia were captured in the pre-dawn. There was little time for the mock trial and then sealing Louis in the wall, and shoving Claudia outside. Certainly not enough time for an elaborate torture to 'help' her. Armand would pass out at dawn.

12. In Tale of the Body thief and Memnoch The Devil Lestat claims that he had slept with many villagers by the time he was fifteen. Yet I could swear he was sixteen when he lost his virginity to the female actress in the troupe he had almost run away with. He never spoke of making love again in his autobiography but it was ambiguously implied what he and Nicki must have done together. I'm sure Lestat WISHES he had been that promiscuous as a mortal but it seems to me he had been very anti-social until he had gotten to Paris was able to truly be himself and let himself go. You saw what it took for him to make his ONLY friend, Nicolas. Also, in Memnoch The Devil Lestat said that many villagers came to the castle claiming he had impregnated their daughters. But in Tale of the Body Thief Lestat became very concerned that he might have accidentally impregnated that one woman. So I doubt he would have simply ignored it if he had gotten someone pregnant in his mortal life.
On the same note, in Memnoch The Devil, while in Hell Lestat had a vision of himself accidentally killing someone in a bar fight while drunk as a mortal. Considering Lestat's mortal obsession with mortality and goodness, somehow I doubt this would have happened without him telling us before. Also, it seems like Anne Rice is confusing him with Louis. Lestat never got into bar room brawls as a mortal. When he got drunk he got maudlin and sentimental, not violent, that's a different type of drinker all together.

13. Lestat's own mother wore men's pantaloons two hundred and twenty years ago. He liked eighties androgyny and was a rock star but in Blood Canticle he yells at Mona to change her dress because it's 'slutty'.

14. In Blood Canticle Lestat keeps praising The Pope and out right said The Pope can do no wrong because he is The Pope. And that even if the Pope does say something that isn't true it automatically becomes true, having happened in some form because the Pope said it did because God ordained that The Pope must always be right. What about the Pope who started the inquisition? Or how about the ones that said Jewish people are evil or the current one who says all rock music and Harry Potter are evil? Lestat would really agree with this? I don't think so! Lestat loves rock music!
Lestat questioned everything! He didn't even believe for sure there was an after-life in his 'autobiography' (The Vampire Lestat). What happened to the rebel
iconoclast who questioned everything and everyone?
Also Anne Rice claims Lestat's opinions are her own. So she feels The Pope can never be wrong yet Anne Rice is pro-gay marriage. The Pope is against gay marriage, Anne Rice is for it, but in her / Lestat's opinion The Pope can never be wrong?

15. What happened to that musician Lestat made into a vampire? And I don't mean Nicki here. I mean the musicain in Interview with the vampire, who was caught in the fire with Lestat as Louis and Claudia fled to Europe in the novel. Why is he never mentioned again by anyone?

16. Page 41 of my paper back edition, chapter 3 of The Early Education and adventures of The Vampire Lestat in The Vampire Lestat novel. It's in the bottom of the third paragraph.
'And now, after eight children, three living, five dead, she was dying. This was the end for her.' This clucludes for me that Lestat being the seventh son and the youngest to survive that one of these children had to have been a daughter. And considering Lestat only says he's the youngest son, it could have been a younger sister. And this contradicts anything later that said Gabrielle had seven children. Seven sons maybe but eight children.
In The Vampire Lestat, first page of Chapter 3 in The Early Education and Adventures of The Vampire Lestat, it's said that Gabrielle had eight children. Everyone always says she had seven. She had seven sons, eight children. This tells me that one was a little girl that did not survive, since her only surviving children are three sons. Also, supposedly each letter in Lestat's name is the first letter of his older brothers. If there are eight children that means there must have been an unmentioned sister. Anne Rice said Lestat was the seventh son, and at one point claimed his initails are each of his brothers first letters to their names. So this means the eighth in the 'three living, five dead' comment is a sister. Lestat had a younger sister we know nothing about.

17. Mistake in The queen of the damned novel. 'My autobiogrpahy was selling well among the dead and the undead.' The DEAD and The Undead, not the living and the undead. Did he mean the living people who read his book were doomed to die or did Casper buy a copy?

18. In Interview with the vampire The reporter was older than Louis in appearance. Louis was twenty-five. This means the reporter is at least twenty-six. Twelve-years-later in nineteen eighty-five the boy is made a vampire. He should be at least thirty-eight but The Queen of the damned novel says he's thirty-two.

19. Gretchen's Stigmata is historically inaccurate. Stigmata is when someone gets the wounds of Christ's crucifixion on their own body. The truth is, in Ancient Rome when they crucified slaves and thieves the nails went through the wrists, not the hands. The bones and flesh of the hands could not support the rest of the body and the hands would have torn and the body would have slumped down. The nails went through the wrists, right through the middle of the wrist, causing the nerves in the thumb to make the thumb collapse in on the palm. Crucifixions never were with nails through the hand. Someone like Anne Rice, with all her religious obsessions, should know this, that the image of the nails through the hands was a result of it simply being easier to replicate in art a thousand years ago. I notice this same mistake in the new movie about Christ's last days. In Memnoch The Devil Lestat observes that the nails go through the wrist, not the hands, as the classic and crucifixes often depict. Was Gretchen's stigmata psychologically induced? Mind ovet matter, belief effecting the physical body?

20. Louis was made the summer of 1791. He had to have been born in 1765 (Contradicting the companion book and websites) because his birthday is October fourth. If he was twenty-five and that October he would be twenty-six he had to have been born in 1765, otherwise he'd have been twenty-four when made a vampire, not to turn twenty-five for another four months. Louis said he was twenty-five when he was made a vampire so he had to have been born in 1765, because he was made a vampire in the summer of 1791 and his birthday isn't until October, if he was born in 1766 then he would not have been twenty-five yet.

21. Anne Rice used to claim that the name Lestat was a mistyping of LeStan since Lestat was based on Stan Rice. Then she claimed it was the first letter of each of Lestat's brothers names yet on the third paragraph of chapter three of The Vampire Lestat it said that Gabrielle had eight children, not seven. Was there a daughter? It so happens that the name Lestat is Old French according to some baby name books which means Gray sky (though some say red, this could be confusion because of the vampiric use of the name by Anne Rice).

22. In The Vampire Lestat, Lestat used a computer word procesor. In Tale of the Body thief Lestat hacked into a police computer data base to track his killers. Yet by Blood Canticle, twelve-years-later not only does he not know how to send an E-mail but he doesn't know what one is! And he's intimidated by technology, admits to this. This from a vampire who used pyrotechnics in his concert, loved synthesizers, video cameras, brightly coloured shampoo, television, movies and most especially eighties rock music? And since when does Lestat admit to fear of anything? It's almost like whoever wrote Blood Canticle never read The Vampire Lestat yet Anne Rice has the gaul to say Blood Canticle practically connects to The Vampire Lestat."

[seasong]

Has anyone mentioned Charles De Lint. He has an amazing approach to vampires in his short stories. He writes contemporary fantasy, and the vampires are quite possibly my favorite characters.