The Vampire Chronicles


Author: Anne Rice

I find my self torn when it comes to Anne Rice. Her stories are great, the historical reasearch is extensive, but the actual writing sucks. I found my self very taken with this series when I first started reading it, there were all these really interesting characters who happened to like blood, being vampires and all. After reading Interview with th Vampire I couldn't wait to start reading the Vampire Lestat, to get a diferent Character's perspective on everything and find out more about them. I really enjoyed it, and with the cliff hanger I had to read Queen of the Damned to finish that little bit of the story.

So basically I managed to read the first three on the hop, and it was a great story. I found I wanted a break though, something else, a diferent style I was getting a little sick of the auto-biographical presentation of the stories. I was however wanting to read someone elses opinions on Vampirism, so I followed the advice of someone, who said "Read Necroscope, you can't miss it it has these really cool covers". So off I marched to the bookshop, purchased a copy of what was to end up as a 13 part series and packed it into my bag for the Train trip to Sydney that was due at the end of the week.

So I settled in for the 11 hour journey, my traveling companion thought it would be a good idea to drop some Sarapax, so I had to entertain myself. Out came the book.

Six hours later I though "gee my legs are craping up, and I really need to pee, how long have I been sitting in this one position" and somehow I was 300 pages through a 500ish page book. If you were starting to wonder yes that little tangent did have a point, I realised the diference between a great storry that is badly written and a great story that is written by someone that can actually write, The winner wasn't Anne Rice.

So it basically took me quite some time before I could bring my self to read "Tale of the Body Thief" it was quite good but I was even more over the writing style by this point and it was a real struggle to then read Memnoch the Devil, It was full of a little too much religious zeal for my liking.

I haven't read any of the other Vampire Chronicles books yet, I did mannage to listen to "The Vampire Armand" on an audio book though. I that that novel can be pretty much summed up in two words "Gay Romance", and of course every one knows that a romance novel is really a porn novel. The other actual interesting parts were all reapeats from the first five books. You know the bits were you actually find out about the character, not about how he shagged someone (usually male).

Something that really must be mentioned is the movies that have been made from this series. The movies are seriously inconsistant. I loved the first movie (Interview with the Vampire) even with the flaws, I own a copy of it on DVD and I have the sound track on CD.

Queen of the Damned is majorly inconsistant, I think they possibly got more things wrong than right, and the helicopter sound the the vampires made was just dumb. At the same time though I must comment on how it was pretty funny and clever at the same time how Melbourne became London, L.A. and New Orleans. The prime example of this was when they walked out of the Talamasca HQ in London, the address on the door was like 8 Latrobe street, they end up on St Kilda Road walking towards Flinders Street station, which has Big Ben super-imposed next to it. I will however get it on DVD just so I can watch the concert scene frame by frame and see how many people I know.

So yeah thats about it I may read another book in the series, but there are many other books to read before I contemplate purchasing it, if you also factor in extra purchases between now and the, and the dice rolling method it may be a couple of years before I manage it.