by Anne Rice
Maybe Rice should have watched a few more horror movies when she was growing up; if so, she would have had a deeper understanding of the perils of bringing a vampire back to life. Her last two novels, The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven, having come to no particular good end, she has returned to a character in her startling 1976 first novel, Interview With the Vampire. Part intoxicating dream, part nightmare, that tale about an 18th-century vampire in New Orleans seemed to use the device of the vampire to comment on the hopes and fears, good and evil, of humanity. This book is another proposition altogether. It begins with a dazzle of an opening chapter, in which Lestat, the vampire, reawakens in New Orleans in 1984 and decides to join a heavy metal rock band with a satanic bent. But then, after only 13 enticing pages, Rice flashes back—for most of the next 468 pages—to the story of how Lestat, a French nobleman's son turned actor, became a vampire in the first place. At one point the critically ill mother of the transformed Lestat arrives in Paris to join him. She comes, no doubt expecting to find that he has a nice steady job as a duke or something, only to learn what he has become—and to have him turn her into a vampire too, to keep him company. Rice plays all this much too straight, delving into the lore of vampires at tedious length; if these fiends don't get you by biting you in the neck, they bore you to death with prattle about the "Dark Gift." Rice is a poet and can write wonderfully even about nothing: "Spring rain. Rain of light that saturated every new leaf of the trees in the street, every square of paving, drift of rain threading light through the empty darkness itself." She's capable of humor: "I was a good marksman when I was a young man," Lestat says at one point, "a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word 'good.' " There's far too little relief, though, far too much gushing blood and dialogue that sounds like Marty, with Lestat and Maman constantly trying to figure out how best to follow the devil's road. Anyone who wants to relate all of this to real life will have to write the book over from scratch. Reading this novel is like playing a slot machine; you keep giving it one more page, and you never get a payoff. (Knopf, $17.95)
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