Prince Lestat and the Blood Communion

So here we are, Blood Communion, another Vampire Chronicles novel.  I'm putting this down as Book 18 in my Vampires / Witches chronology, though to be honest, with some of the latter crossover novels being ignored (essentially rendered non-canon) by Anne Rice, it's probably not necessary anymore.  But given the way Atlantis was brought into the Chronicles, and that the Talamasca still exists, it's all a shared world to me.

Over/under on the Wolf Gift Chronicles crossing over into the shared Vampire universe?  I figure when she finally gets interested in doing another of those, Lestat will be in it.  Especially after what happens in this new entry.  It's fairly short, so my post will be too.

Please note that this post may contain spoilers for all books in Anne Rice's vampires and witches series.  If you plan on reading all of them and don't want anything spoiled for you, stop reading now and come back when you've finished.  There will not be another warning.

A Cumbersome Title

I guess the title of the novel is technically Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat, because we need "Lestat" in the title so people know it's a Vampire Chronicles novel that features Lestat, which must be the only series and character that fans of Anne Rice are interested in?

But if that's the case, why not call it Prince Lestat and the Blood Communion, following the same format of the previous entry, Realms of Atlantis?  It would feel more aligned with the previous two novels that way.  I don't understand titling or marketing sometimes...it's as if they always assume the audience is dumb or knows nothing about the existing franchise.  We're a dozen-plus novels into it here, I think those still following will get it.

More New Ancients

Before I started this novel, I was thinking, "I hope Rice doesn't again introduce a new really old vampire we've never heard of, you would think at this point, after so many novels and near-catastrophic events, that all of the ancient vampires would be known."  I mean, waaaay back in the third entry, Queen of the Damned, all vampires were doomed... and lots of ancients didn't reveal themselves afterward.  In Prince Lestat, all vampires were threatened by Amel, the vampiric spirit... and even that didn't prompt all the ancient vampires to reveal themselves.

Which is why, of course, right at the beginning of Blood Communion we meet Fontayne, a vampire made by Pandora, one we've never heard of before.  Since Pandora made him back in the day, he's like, really old.  I was rolling my eyes until I heard the explanation for his absence, which was actually pretty clever on Rice's part.  He had angered Arjun, Pandora's controlling fledgling, and on pain of death vowed never to reveal himself...until Arjun was killed by Marius towards the beginning of this novel.

So I'll let this one slide.  However—he seemed kind of pointless because after his introduction the rest of the novel is about the Benedict blood communion and Rhoshamandes aftermath and Fontayne only makes brief appearances.

There's also a few more new ancients, like Baudwin and Gundesanth, the latter showing up towards the end.  They had been friends with Gregory in ancient Egyptian times.  There's a lot more Rice could explore there.  I've been generally tired of vampire memoirs—let's focus on the future, rather than the past—but if Rice were going to do one more, a Gundesanth one would probably be interesting.

The Kidnapped Ancients

I actually thought Rice was killing off Louis, Gabrielle, and Marius.  Louis alone would've shocked me but all three at once?  The whole sequence from the kidnappings to their rescue was really well done, especially the part where Lestat kills Rhosh.  That was just badass and is now one of my favorite scenes from the entire Chronicles.

Though I liked the whole sequence, I was a little disappointed that at least one of them didn't die, and it was very fortunate that Lestat was able to find them based off the few words Rhosh screamed before dying.  How cool it would have been had they really died, or been left in their iron coffins, heads twisted backwards, only to be found many, many years later in a future Chronicles novel?

Alas, Rice probably doesn't plan that far ahead and anymore.  These new Prince Lestat novels are more like the Indiana Jones fast-moving serial adventures than anything else.

The Modern Ancient

I like the idea of Lestat essentially becoming one of the ancient ones that we've been reading about... over time they pass away (many ancients have died at this point) or give up on power, choosing a most unlikely ruler for the modern times.  Lestat has broken a lot of the vampire rules and he was chosen leader because of his selfless act of potentially sacrificing himself for all vampires when he gave himself up to Rhosh.

And because of that, all (most) of the vampires are now united in this modern, connected world.  The cults and splinter groups of vampires, like the Children of Satan, are all gone, and pretty much all of them know the history and how it all works.  Knowledge is power?

The rest of the book is kinda anticlimactic: long live Prince Lestat, he brings his village architect (forgot the name) into the Blood, and oh look Marius painted a cool mural of the whole gang, even the new (old) kids on the block like Fontayne.

But you know what... it actually works as a proper ending to the series, when you think of it.  The whole series is about Lestat anyway, and finally he's truly accepted by all the other vampires.

I doubt it will be the end, but if later books turn out to be another mess like the Mayfair crossover, you can just stop after this one and call it day and be satisfied.

Next:

[Book 19] Prince Lestat and the Wolves of Midwinter: A Prince Lestat Tale?

Previous:

[Books 16-17] Prince Lestat and Two New Vampire Novels
[Books 1-15] Vampires & Witches: Hijacked by Taltos

Prince Lestat and Two New Vampire Books

Seven and a half years ago, I wrote a long post on the works of Anne Rice, primarily the books that involved her vampires and witches.  At the time, I thought it was the end of those stories, as Rice (for various reasons) had sworn off writing about Lestat and the vampires any further, and thus I felt safe writing a kind of a mini retrospective about her work that elucidates my displeasure with the ending.

Two years later, Rice decided to return to her vampires after all (shocker!), and wrote two new entries in the series: Prince Lestat (2014) and Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016).  I read them in late 2016 and decided I would do an update post with my thoughts on the new entries.  I meant to post this in 2018, but you know how it is.

In short... the Atlantis and alien stuff I mentioned in my previous blog post has now been shoved into the Vampire Chronicles.  We don't get the space vampires I wanted, but we do get something interesting.

And now it seems Rice has added yet another entry, Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat (2018), since my initial draft on this.  I haven't read it, but I will later this year, and will do a post on it.

Disclaimers

Something you should know right off the bat—these books essentially take place after Memnoch the Devil (1995), in spirit washing away the last few chronological books (like Blackwood Farm (2002) and Blood Canticle (2003)).  Kind of like how Disney turned all of the Star Wars Expanded Universe into "Legends" and rendered all of it non-canon.  It's still there, but now as an "alternate universe."

I really did like the Quinn Blackwood character, though, so I missed him for sure, but I definitely did not miss anything from Blood Canticle.  That book was god-awful, and you can read why in my previous post.  I don't believe anything about the Mayfairs or that crossover nonsense was mentioned in these new Prince Lestat books.  If it was, it didn't make enough of an impression on me.  Plus, it's not that important to the story of these new novels.

Please note that this post may contain spoilers for all books in Anne Rice's vampires and witches series.  If you plan on reading all of them and don't want anything spoiled for you, stop reading now and come back when you've finished.  There will not be another warning.

On with the post!

My Thoughts

I have mixed feelings on these new entries.  Half of the content I liked, half I didn't.  I'm not as attached to the way Rice presented the vampire world in the first couple of books as some people are, and I was completely memoir-ed out, so it was nice to get new entries that were firmly rooted in today's modern, technological world.  I've always wanted Rice to explore vampires in the future rather than the past, and this scratched that itch somewhat.

But!  I also don't like Rice's crossover tendencies and in my opinion, if you're going to come up with some new race or thing, make it a separate thing.  Stop trying to shove it into an already established world to "add to the richness" or whatever nonsense.  Rice's efforts to further expand on the origin of the vampires introduces an entirely new race of alien beings and just makes everything even more messier than it already was.

So if you are a fan of the majority of the books (like me), I recommend them.  Just lower your expectations and be ready to do a lot of eye rolling.

Vampires in the Now

From the very beginning of Prince Lestat you are presented with the vampires we know and love and hate using the internet and devices like iPhones.  I was wondering why we hadn't seen much of that in the previous entries, and then I remembered that she "ended" the series in 2003.  The internet was not as pervasive then and the iPhone wouldn't be around for another four years.

I always wondered what vampires would do in the age of social media, always-on technology, always being watched, etc.  In Prince Lestat we have one starting an internet radio show for vampires, and everyone connecting together online.  Vampires no longer hide in the shadows and most of the vampires in existence are known.  Which basically kills the mystique of vampires and what attracted many people to these books in the first place.  When normal mortals know who they are and follow them around like paparazzi, snapping pics with their iPhones...then they're nothing but modern celebrities.  Which makes logical sense to me.

There's also a doctor-turned-vampire who delves more into the science behind vampirism.  Rice previously explained that it was caused by some parasite in the blood, an ancient spirit passed on to whoever was infected.  As we all know, killing the original host of that spirit kills all other vampires.  Maharet took over hosting at the end of The Queen of the Damned, when Akasha was killed.  This is an important element in the two novels covered here.

Prince Lestat...

This book is all over the place, but the tl;dr is:

• Vampires are more connected than ever before due to technology and the internet
• Much like humans, they have proliferated exponentially
• They begin to hear a voice that is telling them to kill other vampires
• Essentially, the vampire spirit (Amel) is spread too thin across too many vampires (overpopulation), he needs to contract, and he's looking for a new host
• Rhoshamandes kills Maharet and Khayman and kidnaps Mekare, the host of Amel
• Lestat agrees to become the new host of Amel, Mekare is destroyed, Rhosh is punished

Perhaps you are wondering who Rhoshamandes is.  So was I.  This character was made a vampire by Akasha herself way back in the day, but first appears in this book.  I'm not a fan of introducing new ancient vampires at this point... surely we would have heard of him before?  What was he doing when all the stuff in The Queen of the Damned was going down?

There is also a minor plot line involving a new character named Fareed, a vampire doctor, who is studying the science behind vampirism and wants to extract Lestat's um, sperm, to um, enable him to um, procreate.  Never thought I'd type a sentence like that in my blogs. 

...and the Realms of Atlantis

While I enjoyed the overall concept and story of Realms of Atlantis on its own merit, combining it with the vampire canon was completely unnecessary to me.  From earlier interviews, it sounded like Rice's Atlantis story was going to be its own thing, but for some reason she decided to shove it into the vampire world.

Why?  I guess perhaps by doing so, it prevents it from being considered a plain old science fiction story.  The explanation is probably simpler than that: more people will buy a Lestat novel from Anne Rice than an Atlantis science fiction novel from Anne Rice.

Anyway, if you ignore the vampire stuff entirely, it's actually an interesting story with some cool concepts.  Unfortunately, in trying to further explain where Amel comes from, Rice only creates more questions with the introduction of the human-like manufactured Replimoids and the Parents, bird-like alien beings from a planet called Bravenna.  I thought the existing explanation from The Queen of the Damned was more than sufficient.  Sometimes it's better to leave certain things unexplained.

But now that Lestat is the vampire host for Amel, we get the whole story straight from the spirit's mouth:

• Amel himself was human-turned-Replimoid that was sent to Earth by the Parents to establish communication outposts so the Parents could prepare to consume all life on the planet
• Amel got bored, abandoned his mission, and founded Atlantis (nee Atalantaya)
• Some other Replimoids were sent to kill him because he disobeyed the Parents
• Atlantis fell and Amel was killed but his spirit survived to be contacted by Maharet and Mekare
• The other Replimoids were buried in ice for a long time, but they eventually are freed:
• One becomes a prisoner of some other ancient vampire (whose name I've forgotten) because he provides an unending source of blood (Replimoids are essentially immortal and can self-heal, i.e. cut off an arm and it grows back)
• The others search for him and then...

...you know what, never mind.  This book is really hard to summarize effectively, and you should have read it anyway, if you're reading this blog.  Or tried to read it, considering how many people seemed to have given up on it in disgust based on the Goodreads reviews I've seen.

At the end of day: Amel is eventually separated from Lestat and put into a Replimoid body and the vampires remain vampires without being tied to the spirit.  A perfect setup for more Lestat hijinks!

Vampires on Audiobook

This time, instead of actually buying the physical books, I chose to listen to the audiobooks.  If you're wondering why I don't use many character names in this post, this is why.  I can't remember them, and I don't have a book that I can go back and check.  That's the only real drawback of listening to an audiobook... no easy way to skim back over the content to find that detail or recall a name.

Other than that, I really enjoyed listening to them as audiobooks (I don't have as much time to sit and read anymore, and they are great for long commutes).  It was a bit tougher for Prince Lestat than for Realms of Atlantis, because there are so many characters and many get their own long chapters.  Depending on when I took a break from the book, sometimes I'd forget what character POV I was on when I came back.

Vampires on TV?

To wrap this all up, it appears the Vampire Chronicles are on their way to the small screen.  Rice regained the complete theatrical rights to the Chronicles in 2016, and with the addition of Bryan Fuller in Jan 2018, it seemed to be moving along towards actual production.  However, in late 2019, it was dropped by Hulu and is being shopped elsewhere.  And with the COVID-19 pandemic going on right now, I assume it's going to be a while until we see it actually materialize, if ever.

I'm excited to see a faithful adaption, despite expectations being high in a post-Game of Thrones world.  The series is being produced by Paramount Televsion, so we'll see how that turns out.  HBO set the bar with fantasy production values on television.  Can other channels manage the same thing?  (SyFy / Amazon Prime has done well with The Expanse, an adaptation of the science fiction series by James S.A. Corey, which I highly recommend—both the books and TV show.)

What's Next?

There's another book to read!  I've added Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat to my Audible list and will get to it soon.

Will there be even more vampire books from Anne Rice?  At this point, I'd say that's a certainty.  She's already gone back on her word so I expect that whenever she discovers a story featuring Lestat to be told, she'll tell it.  And if it gets traction on TV and becomes popular again... it's a sure thing.  Maybe she can bring Quinn Blackwood into this new continuity?

I'm clearly not a fan of everything she's done, but I'll still read it.  I can't help it.

Next:

[Book 18] Prince Lestat and the Blood Communion 

Previous:

[Books 1-15] Vampires & Witches: Hijacked by Taltos

Vampires & Witches: Hijacked by Taltos

Most people who have been engaged in popular culture or fiction at some level during the last 20 years are probably familiar with Anne Rice and one or two of her "gothic horror/fiction" novels, notably The Vampire Chronicles, that revolve around vampires.  She also wrote a trilogy regarding witches, called Lives of the Mayfair Witches, whose characters eventually crossed over into The Vampire Chronicles.  And if you lump in the two "outrigger" New Tales of the Vampires novels she did, you end up with fifteen novels total regarding the supernatural world of vampires and witches.

After many years of putting it off, I finally finished the last few novels in this multiple series amalgam, and much like the Chung Kuo review / commentary I did a few months ago, the ending left me a bit dissatisfied and bewildered, and I felt compelled to say something about these works as a result.

Please note that this post contains spoilers for all books in the three series listed above.  If you plan on reading all of them and don't want anything spoiled for you, stop reading now and come back when you've finished.  There will not be another warning.

If you've already read it or just don't care, read on.

The Background

First, a little background.  I discovered Anne Rice sometime in high school, probably around 1992.  I don't remember how I found her works, but I quickly devoured everything that was out at the time, which was only the first three in The Vampire Chronicles and the first book in Lives of the Mayfair Witches, entitled The Witching Hour.

I was blown away by these books, particularly The Witching Hour.  Anne Rice essentially set the standard for vampires in modern fiction, and I loved how realistic everything was, how the characters were tormented and struggling with their immortality and the fact they had to kill to survive, how they coped over the years.  I loved the vampire history that Rice presented, how it actually explained the vampires' origin (a malevolent spirit infesting the blood) and how it melded with the modern world without being too cheesy.  The thought of Lestat, the main vampire character throughout the series, being a modern-day rock star didn't sit with me well at first, but Rice made it work and I became a fan.

The infamous New Orleans First Street house Anne Rice used to live in,
used for the setting of The Witching Hour.

And then there was The Witching Hour.  I haven't read all of Rice's works, but I've read most, and I think this is by far her finest novel.  The rich and eerie history of the Mayfair family made for a 1,000 page page-turner with a shocking, cliffhanger ending.  I couldn't wait for the next book in the series.

I got heavily into both series after that.  I re-read them.  A few more came out and then the movie adaptation of the first vampire novel, Interview With the Vampire, staring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, opened and Anne Rice was a common household name.  I went to that movie on opening night in college and loved it.  A couple of years later, in 1997, I visited New Orleans over spring break with my older brother and sister-in-law, saw some of the landmarks mentioned in the series, took a guided "ghost and vampire" tour at night, and even stopped by Anne Rice's house on First Street to see it for myself.

Ebb and Flow

After college my interest in her books came and went like the tide... I would read old and new in chunks, then take a break for a year or two before picking it back up again.  I was severely disappointed in how the Mayfair Witches trilogy played out (more on that later), but continued to enjoy The Vampire Chronicles, though it did not seem like they were heading anywhere, the series reduced to individual memoirs with Lestat taking a backseat.  I figured she'd leave it open-ended and write a book from time to time.  I mean, how do you end a series about immortals?

Soon, however, she introduced the Mayfairs into the vampire storyline, starting with Merrick in 2000.  It seemed inevitable since both series involved The Talamasca.  I wasn't that thrilled with the book, though.  I got the rest of the books as they came out, but stopped after reading 2001's Blood and Gold (the 13th overall in the combined series) and watching the 2002 film Queen of the Damned (which unsuccessfully mashed together the books The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned).  That movie sucked, they butchered the story and Stuart Townsend wasn't half as good as Tom Cruise in the role of Lestat.  Rice has pretty much disowned that movie, from what I've read.

So I took a break and the last two books sat there.  I figured I would get to them in a year, perhaps.

Wrong.  I didn't read them until now, eight years later.  They've been sitting on my bookshelves, untouched that entire time.  I know it's eight years because I keep track of the dates for every book I buy (see my 2011 Media Consumption post to see how dorky I am) and my database says I bought the last volume, Blood Canticle, on 10/2/2004.  And it's definitely old... the top edge of the pages has yellowed over time.

So in trying to get through my incessant backlog, I finally read the last two books.  I had to read synopses of the earlier books in preparation because I hadn't touched them in years.  I wasn't sure what I was in for.  I knew Rice had left New Orleans after the death of her husband in 2002, and that she had rejoined the Church and had written fictionalized accounts of Jesus Christ.  But not much else, as I had lost interest in her after she stopped the vampire and witch novels.

The Books

Now, altogether I'm talking about fifteen books technically broken into three different series.  However, due to the crossover towards the end of The Vampire Chronicles, and the fact that two separate New Tales of the Vampires books are really no different than the other memoirs in the main sequence (and that Rice had seemingly given up on that grouping), they are part of the same world and should be read together, in my opinion.  The later entries in the Chronicles will definitely make more sense if you've read the Mayfair Witches.

The best order to read them, of course, is the order they were published in.  The italic abbreviations are the series and volume.  I also categorize them into three types: Lestat, Witches and Memoir.  The letter(s) in brackets represent those.  Some books are more than one.

Here are all fifteen:

1. Interview With the Vampire (1976) - tVC 1 [L, M]
2. The Vampire Lestat (1985) - tVC 2 [L, M]
3. The Queen of the Damned (1988) - tVC 3 [L]
4. The Witching Hour (1990) - LotMW 1 [W]
5. The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) - tVC 4 [L]
6. Lasher (1993) - LotMW 2 [W]
7. Taltos (1994) - LotMW 3 [W]
8. Memnoch the Devil (1995) - tVC 5 [L]
9. Pandora (1998) - NTotV 1 [M]
10. The Vampire Armand (1998) - tVC 6 [M]
11. Vittorio, the Vampire (1999) - NTotV 2 [M]
12. Merrick (2000) - tVC 7 [L, W]
13. Blood and Gold (2001) - tVC 8 [M]
14. Blackwood Farm (2002) - tVC 9 [L, W, M]
15. Blood Canticle (2003) - tVC 10 [L, W]

Lestat is undoubtedly the central character.  It's more about him than anyone else, and Anne Rice eventually went post-modern, having Lestat publish the earlier volumes in The Vampire Chronicles within the series itself, for the world to read as fiction and newer vampires to learn from.

Now, I think it's obvious that as the popularity of the series rose (particularly with the Tom Cruise movie in 1994), Rice focused solely on vampires and rode the wave of success.  Whether this burned her out, or she tired of it due to her husband's death in 2002 and rushed it (she finished the last volume, Blood Canticle, just two months before he died), or ran out of ideas and just came up with a quick way to "resolve" both series and fulfill contractual obligations at the same time... I don't know.  And it doesn't really matter.  What matters is that two series that started out fantastic and strong, were mashed together and died with a whimper.

My Anne Rice books.  Yes, two are missing.  Read on to find out why.
I also lost the dust jacket for The Vampire Armand, that's why it's
open to the title page in the pic.

The Beginning of the End

So... why don't I like the ending?  How did it die out?

First, as I mentioned before, there probably shouldn't have been a definitive ending to either series.  The vampires are immortal.  That series is a mish-mash of various stories and memoirs.  For something like that you just leave it open-ended.  Maybe you come back to it, maybe you don't.  The witches continue to be witches in the modern day, but perhaps use their powers for "good," like Rowan Mayfair does with the Mayfair Medical Center (or so we believe at first).  But the fact that the last book, Blood Canticle, actually says "THE END" with a date, when none of the other books do, makes it clear Rice was ending it all.

Second, I just have one word:

Taltos.

Oh Anne... why did you have to go there?

The introduction of the Taltos in Lasher (Book 2 of the Mayfair Witches), essentially ruined everything for me.  Everything.  Rice went from a fantastic book about witches (The Witching Hour) and turned it into some story about this ancient race of beings that are roughly 7 feet tall, are born aware, grow to human size soon after birth, live for thousands of years, etc etc. It's obviously inspired by the táltos of Hungarian mythology.

With the books Lasher and Taltos, however, what made The Witching Hour so awesome (the Mayfair family history) was mostly thrown out the window. Lasher the Mayfair Ghost becomes Lasher the Taltos (instead of just a human), he's obsessed with perpetuating his race (he dies instead) and the third book in that series, Taltos, focusing on more Taltos births by the Mayfairs, was horrible.  The surviving Taltos disappear at the end and it's left unresolved.  I hated it and the direction Rice had gone.

In fact, Lasher upset me so much that I ended up donating it to the public library.  I never bought Taltos, I merely borrowed it from a friend when it came out, and I'm glad I didn't waste any money on it.  So that's why both are missing from my book picture above.

The Crossover

I figured, okay, the Mayfair Witches was ruined, but I still had The Witching Hour, a fantastic book I'd gladly read again without bothering to read the sequels.  And The Vampire Chronicles were still decent.  I enjoyed the different memoirs that Rice was doing, focusing on familiar characters like Armand, Pandora and Marius, as well as some new ones like Vittorio and later in Blackwood Farm, Tarquin Blackwood.  At least she hadn't screwed that up, right?

Wrong.  Rice introduced the Mayfairs into the vampire storyline in Merrick, where the eponymous, outcast quadroon of a Mayfair becomes a vampire.  Which ends up ultimately being pointless since she abruptly kills herself a few years later at the end of Blackwood Farm, which I thought was a pretty good novel, especially that late in the series.

I personally think Rice writes best when the story involves a personal or family history.  Each one of those she has done has been quite engrossing.  The best books in these series are memoirs / histories.  The others, set in modern times, are weaker overall.  Rice has mentioned that she had trouble getting her ideas about the world down when writing through normal human characters, but had better success once she turned to non-humans.  This equates to past vs. present as well, it seems to me.

Blood Canticle

So as I mentioned, I liked Blackwood Farm, the penultimate novel in the series.  It was well done and interesting, had a good main character (Tarquin "Quinn" Blackwood) and a nice twist to the end which I didn't see coming.  While I didn't find the way Quinn interacted with his family and black house staff all that believable (maybe it's just because I wasn't raised in the South), I liked everything else.  It ends on a slight cliffhanger and I moved immediately into the last novel, Blood Canticle.

I guess the cover is okay...

This book has gotten panned in many reviews, and I'm going to have to add my voice to theirs.  It's not very good and is a far cry from the classic Rice novels.  Lestat is obsessed with becoming a saint now and just doesn't act like he used to.  This book is a mess, and reminds me of how Chung Kuo originally ended.  So like that blog post, here's a rundown of how ridiculous this book gets.

1: Anne Rice chastises her readership
This is the first novel since 1995's Memnoch the Devil to be narrated by Lestat.  And the very beginning is him chastising you, the reader, for not liking his last book, Memnoch.  I liked that book, but a lot of others didn't.  And I suppose it's in character... but it felt petty to me.  It reminded me of the movie Lady in the Water, when after taking a lot of criticism for his last few movies, writer / director M. Night Shyamalan cast himself as a character who's written works which will someday "change the world" and where a film critic in the movie meets a violent end.

2: Mona Mayfair becomes a vampire
Stop turning everyone into a vampire, Rice!  Lestat does this for Quinn, and everyone's lives are turned upside down.  Mona was near death, but now they have to find a way to explain to the persistent Mayfairs (Rowan and Michael) how she miraculously recovered.  Lestat has blown their cover, and Quinn is mostly to blame since he can't let go of his mortal life.  It's an interesting storyline, one that makes Blackwood Farm interesting, but here it just turns into a mess and precipitates all that comes later.

3: Lestat falls in love with Rowan Mayfair
This just feels wrong to me.  Why did this need to happen?  If you've read both series you know how weird this seems.  Rowan has gone to hell and back through the Mayfair Witches, and throwing all this vampire stuff on top of that is overkill.  Besides, I don't really like Rowan all that much after the events of The Witching Hour.

4: Drug runners in the Caribbean
Mona, now that she's a vampire, wants to find out what happened to her Taltos baby, named Morrigan.  Rowan and Michael tried to find her and Ash Templeton (the older Taltos who ran off with her at the end of Taltos) but eventually gave up.  Of course Maharet knows and tells Lestat via email, and within minutes they are off to the Caribbean island where the Taltos have hidden themselves - only to find it occupied by South American drug runners and the remaining Taltos captured.  Lestat and Co. just go through and kill all the drug runners in an extended action sequence featuring Matrix-style telekinesis and pyrokinesis that feels out of place.

5: The Taltos' efforts were POINTLESS
The ultimate insult is when you find out what happened to Ash, Morrigan and their Taltos children.  The children rebel, kill the parents, and fight amongst themselves.  Lasher spent hundreds of years manipulating the Mayfair's lineage so that he could be reborn in a Taltos to restart the race - and they failed.  They were not meant for this time, and cannot survive it in great numbers.  So all this crap was for nothing.  THEY FAILED.  And both series were ruined.

6: It's anticlimactic
Huh?  This sprawling saga about vampires and witches "ends" like this?  Usually when you end something, there's some kind of resolution.  The only resolution you get here is for the ill-begotten Taltos storyline that should have never been introduced in the first place, and the resolution isn't even any good!

The End?

So... the series came to a somewhat ignominious end (at least for me).  I am not happy with it.  I understood why Chung Kuo ended as it did.  I don't understand why Rice ended with Blood Canticle.  It's just not a good book or idea compared to the earlier entries.

But is it truly the end of the series for Rice?  In recent years she has left the Catholic Church (again) and turned back to some supernatural fiction with The Wolf Gift (her take on werewolves) and the Songs of the Seraphim series (about an assassin).

There's also something new she's working on called Born for Atlantis, which according to this November 2011 interview on The Daily Beast, is about:

"...several immortals sent to the planet during the time of Atlantis and it tells the story of what happened.  They're now still alive in the modern age and they're facing a crisis."

I don't know about you, but I would be surprised if this new book didn't feature Tommy Blackwood (from Blackwood Farm, Quinn's nephew) somehow, since he says many times that he wants to search for Atlantis when he gets older.  Could Rice tie this back into the Vampire Chronicles somehow?

She also mentions in the interview that she's working on something involving aliens.  Now, I've always thought that she should expand the Vampire Chronicles to the future somehow.  Enough with the books set in modern times or past memoirs.  Take it further.

Restart the series by jumping ahead a few hundred years.  What would Lestat be like he future?  Quinn after a few hundred years of vampire life?  Would they still be able to hide from society like they can now?  I don't think anyone has done a good take on vampires in the future yet (if anyone has any recommendations, I'm all ears).  The only decent part of Blood Canticle was the possibility of Rowan and her medical clinic getting a sample of Lestat's blood to analyze.  What would happen should modern day scientists understand vampirism on a scientific level?

So who else had this book as a kid?

Will we ever know?  Rice isn't known for science fiction, but she is planning the "alien" thing, and she's got good enough chops for fantasy and historical fiction - so she could pull it off.  You don't have to be technical or necessarily understand certain technologies in order to write an engrossing story set in the future or in space.

I can only hope she returns to the vampires at some point, which would turn the crappy ending into just another crappy middle book we can ignore.  But unlike Chung Kuo, there won't be a "remastering" of the end.  We're stuck with it.

Damn you, Taltos!  *shakes fist*

Next:

[Books 16-17] Prince Lestat and Two New Vampire Books