Advantages: Brilliant combination of suspense and philosophy
Disadvantages: There really aren't any

..., what it is to be human, both good and bad. And never is this more obvious than in The Queen of the Damned. The vampires of Rice’s world personify, and are even morally superior to the human world. The novel is the third part of the Vampire Chronicles that Rice has written, and follows on from The Vampire Lestat, where Lestat has become a modern day icon, through being a rock star and publishing his autobiography which reveals the secrets of vampires. Of course, the human population doesn’t catch onto the fact that all of it is true and that Lestat’s identity is not fiction. Akasha, the Egyptian queen and mother of all vampires, has been awakened from her 6,000 year sleep by Lestat’s outspoken behaviour, and has designs on her own infamy: Akasha, wishes to be goddess to the world and to eliminate all vampires... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Brilliant!
Disadvantages: May get confused with the layout of the book

...Akasha, the very first vampire therefore the title the queen of the damned. Lestat 'the damndest creature' has now woken Akasha after thousands of years and causing catastrophy over the whole world. With new characters and old caracters we find in this book the fate of the vampires and tales from thousands of years ago when the vampire was created, up to nowadays twentieth century. The third book of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and as good as the first two books. This book follows up on Lestats journey from the second book: The Vampire Lestat, but it is not a must to read the book before you read this one. For £6.99 from Waterstones I thaught this book was a bargain, I found it thicker thicker than the first two books with up to 573 pages but it is such a good book that I really could not put it down. The only draw back I found... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Great reading, a must read for anyone that has seen the film.
Disadvantages: None

...I haven’t read any books for years, I can’t remember exactly the last time I did, maybe as long as 20 years ago! Shame on me. And I can’t even remember the name of the last book. Anyway, after reading opinions about all sorts of different books, I decided that I must be missing out, so decided to choose a book to read. I enjoyed the film, Interview with the Vampire, and my sister was raving how good the books by the author were. Anne Rice has written quite a few books, which she calls The Vampire Chronicles, and Interview with the Vampire is the first volume in the series. It took just under a week to read. I spent a couple of hours each night on it, until I had finally finished it. I had forgotten how much description from an author goes into a book, and this book was no exception. It helped that I had seen... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: An amazing believable world, Can't put it down!
Disadvantages: Can't put it down!

...I decided to start writing about the Vampire Chronicles at the second one! Odd maybe, but an Interview with a Vampire, the first book of the series, is very well known now, especially after the release of the film. I decided to start with the next one along, The Vampire Lestat, as I felt that this is where you can really start to enter the world that Anne Rice has created. So what are the Vampire Chronicles? The Vampire Chronicles are based around Lestat de Lioncourt, the Brat Prince, as he is called by some of the older vampires. Although an Interview with a Vampire began with Louis Pont du Lac, it is Lestat who is the central figure for the Chronicles. I will explain more later! The Vampire Lestat begins in the mid 1980's where Lestat is woken by listening to a rock band playing nearby. He tells you how the world looks... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Excellent English and a fascinating story
Disadvantages: Can't find any

...Vampires (according to themselves as well as the Talamasca studies) are almost eternal. The strongest of them have a long life to live, all sorts of possible mistakes to make, misunderstandings to create and - being vampires – people to kill. Vampire Lestat is fond of mistakes, and tries to make them all before he dies. He is a wonderful man, meaning, vampire, very fond of truth and searching for it, handsome, gifted, strong and lonely, not quite a friend of his best friends, not quite a man, not quite a demon, not quite mortal, not quite eternal. He doesn’t have too many illusions, but those he does have he loses. All the “Vampire Cronicles” are about losing illusions. Lestat is destructive, and in the beginning of any of his loves and hopes is its end and decay. Vampire Lestat is all of us. Haven... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: A must for readers of the first chronicle. Beautifully written.
Disadvantages: None whatsoever.

...I have just finished reading the second book of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. It has taken just a few days to read. A fatter book than the first, it was compelling reading, and I just could not put it down. I found myself not only reading this at bedtime, but in the middle of the day too. If you have read my opinion on Interview With The Vampire, you will know that Anne Rice’s style of writing had made me start to fall in love with Lestat, the Master vampire. By the end of this book, I was now truly in love with him. This book is about his story, how he came to be vampire, his search for knowledge about his kind, and about the love and fears he has felt throughout his 200 years of immortality. I wanted to hold him, I wanted to tell him things that I know I cannot. But it wasn’t a feeling of desire... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Excellent scripting and the new characters are interesting
Disadvantages: Another reinvention of the Vampire mythos

...Some books are very hard to form an educated opinion about. "Queen of the Damned" is one of them. I liked this novel, but I certainly didn't love it. I am hooked on Anne Rice's vampire series, but I hope "Queen of the Damned" is only a speed bump and not an indication of how the rest of these novels are going to go. In my opinion, the writing quality has gone downhill drastically since her masterful "The Vampire Lestat". I found myself plodding along though this novel, trying to muster up some interest in what these characters were doing. It was very difficult at times, but I did finish it and will come back for more. The side plots and flashback stories were much more interesting than the current "crisis" these characters were facing. I very much enjoyed the introductions and background stories of Jesse, Daniel, Maharet, Baby... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: A must read for Anne Rice fans and those of the vampire chronicles. You won't want to put it down.
Disadvantages: Involves other characters, which can either be a good or a bad thing.

...The book worm returns, after reading the third of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, The Queen of the Damned. Before reading it, I knew that some people didn’t find it as good as the first two, but I neither liked it any less or any better than the first two. It was a part of the saga, so it had to be read. Anne Rice still manages to keep that magical atmosphere throughout her books, and if anyone thinks that these are gruesome horror novels, then think again. They are stories about Vampires. Yes, they have to drink blood in order to survive, but it goes beyond that. They are not just dark ghouls that prey on the living, in fact, they have friends who are still human, and they wouldn’t dream of taking their life. Queen of the Damned carries on from where The Vampire Lestat left off. Lestat is the lead singer... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Memnoch's tale is fascinating, and Rice's prose is as Lush as ever.
Disadvantages: So what have the vampires got to do with it then?

...'Memnoch the Devil' is the fifth of the Vampire Chronicles, all of which have featured the vampire Lestat, a charismatic monster and frequent narrator of Rice's novels. Prior to this tale, the stories have been grounded in a mixture of reality and vampire mythology. The strange and uncanny exists on this world, but we are still ON this world. Vampires embody the uncanny, but they're about as far as it goes (throw the occasional spirit and a witch or two into the mix, but not much more). We have, up until now, witnessed and been told of the earthly adventures of these creatures. That's what makes them so fascinating, that juxtaposition of the normal and the uncanny, and with this fifth book, Rice seems to have forgotten this. Let me backtrack a little first. As this book opens, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that Lestat... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Suspense and drama in the usual style by Ms Rice
Disadvantages: None

...I tell no fibs, honestly. Would I use a cheap trick like that? Following on from Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice wrote The Vampire Lestat as the second part of The Vampire Chronicles. As a quick recap (but if you haven’t read Interview with the Vampire or seen the film, this will mean nothing to you!), Lestat was Louis’ creator in Interview with the Vampire and well, wasn’t considered to be a popular ‘vamp’ by Louis in his narration. Lestat was regarded by Louis, as a bit secretive fellow who wouldn’t tell of the vampire secrets that Louis new that he knew (if you see what I mean). Louis and Claudia (another child of the devil-spawn, Lestat who was this time a real child) got a bit upset by this, felt Lestat was a nasty bit of work, and too possessive by far and tried to kill him –... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful