The Queen of the Damned (2006)

By Anne Rice
I’m always a bit suspicious of books that contain the word “frisson”. It turned up relatively early in this book, but at least I didn’t notice a repeat offence. This book all seemed a bit silly at first, but I got sucked in (Ha!) by all those eternally youthful beautifully beautiful dark and mysterious and sexy vampires. Really, it did start to bother me after a while that they were all so attractive. Rice even muses, through the voice of her hero vampire Lestat, are there any ugly vampires? Well I think I spotted one, but he didn’t last very long.

This book is the third in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, following Interview with the Vampire (the one made into a film with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt; not bad, from memory, surprisingly…) and The Vampire Lestat. To sum up, Lestat has gone and woken up the Mother of All Vampires (I’m not kidding), the titular (that’s for you, Ian) Queen of the Damned, Akasha, who has been dormant for thousands of years, but now she’s awake again and this time she’s a lot crosser.

For some reason, the Queen seems to be killing off all the vampires, except for our favourites of course. What is she up to?? We find out along the way how vampires came to exist and what the Queen’s badass dealio is anyway. I got a bit addicted to the whole story, if a little impatient with all the descriptions of how gorgeous and tortured everbody was.

Rice even manages to weave in some serious topics, a la Cocoon. For example, if someone offered you a smoothie that would make you immortal, would you drink? (Ha!) If someone dangled a tempting tidbit in front of you that would make your loved ones immortal, would you bite? (Ha! Ha!) Also, more to the point, would you ask them first?? Would a world run by women really be any less violent than one that’s still pretty much ruled by men? (You’ll have to read the book to see how that one fits in). She also offers some interesting alternative theories as to how embalming and mummification came to be the dominant way of honouring the dead – as opposed to eating their corpses, of course. (I must confess I began to be persuaded of the merits of this option – eww!! Boy, I was really sucked in).

This book was written in 1988 and I’m wondering if that was the same era as Virginia Andrews and Flowers in the Attic and so forth – it has that same kind of outrageous gothic scandalous mixed up relationships thing going. Hmmm…must re-read some good old Virginia Andrews sometime…

Rating: 6 out of 10