Blurb
‘Ah, the taste and feel of blood when all passion and greed is sharpened in that one desire!’ a vampire – but very much not the conventional undead, for Lestat is the truly alive. Lestat is vivid, ecstatic, stagestruck, and in his extravagant story he plunges from the lasciviousness of eighteenth-century Paris to the demonic Egypt of prehistory; from fin-de-siecle New Orleans to the frenetic twentieth-century world of rock superstardom – as, pursued by the living and the dead, he searches across time for the secret of his own dark immortality.
Review
Book 2 of The Vampire Chronicles, this story started better than the first one (Interview with the Vampire – IWTV) but fell short midway through in my opinion. The description is tedious and drawn out, and I found the back stories for some of the side characters unnecessary. I very much enjoyed the part about Lestat’s human life, his family and friends, and everything about Nicolas, Lestat’s best friend. Nicolas’s downfall was hard to read and I blamed Lestat for all of it. His selfishness in the name of protection contributed to Nick’s path into darkness and, because of that, I disliked Lestat as much as I did back in the first book. I despised Lestat’s wretch of a mother and wished she would’ve died, permanently. Armand’s back story was interesting but I didn’t see how it contributed to Lestat’s life or the choices he made. Marius’s back story, however, I loved and it fit well with this story.
I was disappointed with the recap of IWTV. It’s from Lestat’s POV but we learned very little about why he acted the way he did with Louis. Why didn’t Lestat help Louis and instruct him even though he couldn’t betray Marius’s secret? Why didn’t Lestat tell Louis that he only fed on criminals, not good people? (Though I’m not even sure if Lestat followed his own rules all the time while in New Orleans.) There were too many unanswered questions.
For me, the best part of the book was all the scenes set in 1984, before Lestat was turned into a vampire in 1780, and Marius’s back story.
2 Stars
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