Product Description

After 6,000 years of horrifying stillness, Akash, mother of all vampires and Queen of the Damned, has risen from her sleep to let loose the powers of the night. But her monstrous plan for ruling the worlds of the living and the undead must be stopped before she destroys mankind, and it falls to the evil vampire Lestat to fight her all-encompassing evil - for it is he who challenged her power by waking her from sleep.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3400 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Review
'By filtering staple mythic conventions through her own gothic sensibility, Anne Rice is able to create an entertaining legend of her own' - NEW YORK TIMES 'The text pulses with menace, mystery and violence, and with sensuality verging on erotica' - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 'Imaginative ... intelligently written ... This is popular fiction of the highest order' USA TODAY

About the Author
Anne Rice is the author of the celebrated series of gothic novels featuring the vampire Lestat. As Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure she is one of the best contemporary writers of erotic fiction.

Customer Reviews

Damn(ed)
Anne Rice revamped vampire fiction in "Interview with the Vampire," the first volume of her bestselling Vampire Chronicles. But the highest point of the entire series was "Queen of the Damned," an epic vampire story full of sensuality, terror, and a haunting picture of greed and power's effect.

Not only are vampires everywhere having odd dreams, but they are getting peeved about Lestat's music videos, which reveal secrets about vampire history. Some even plan to kill him. But those same music videos wake Akasha, the mother of all vampires, who kills her sleeping husband and casts Marius into an icy prison.

Then she goes on a rampage, setting vampires on fire and finally escaping with the Brat Prince himself. The vampire cast thus far gather together, hoping to defeat the malignant Akasha; elsewhere, Lestat begins to think the same when he finds that Akasha is a mad megalomaniac. But Akasha cannot be destroyed without killing every vampire on earth...

Out of her entire bibliography, Anne Rice wrote only one epic story -- one that spans the world, time, and three novels' worth of characters (Armand, Gabrielle, Marius, Louis...). Lots of fictional memoirs, but no more epics. Perhaps she should write more, because this book remains not only her finest novel, but a stirring, creepy read on its own.

Rice's lush prose is well-suited to many characters, whether they're rogue Talamasca or biker vampires. She skips effortlessly from ancient Egypt to a hard-rock concert, with the same level of skill. And most importantly, she creates a stunning explanation for why the vampires exist, wrapped up in ancient Egyptian imperialism and malevolent spirits.

The plot twists and winds itself every which way, before finally smoothing out into a finale that makes perfect sense. And the present scenario is just as gripping, with Lestat realizing that Akasha plans to kill off 99% of the men in the world, and be a goddess. That's what happens when you run off with strange women, Lestat.

The large cast in this means that almost everybody gets a turn in the spotlight -- Armand, Marius, Louis, Pandora, the guy who recorded Louis's story in the first book, and Gabrielle. Not to mention a few new ones, like the ancient Maharet and Mael. And the Brat Prince shines the most brightly of all, in his nastiness, naivete, and delight in his own unlife.

"Queen of the Damned" is a remarkable epic novel, despite the spotty series it was a part of. This is Anne Rice at her peak: thrilling, chilling, and almost magical.

Read this book now!
The Queen of the Damned should ideally be read after the first two volumes of the vampire chronicles. In my opinion this book is the best of the series. Anne Rice takes a number of different plot threads and weaves them together leading to an exciting and memorable climax. Everyone who reads this book finds a character they can relate to as Rice makes her characters more realistic by having fears and faults just like the rest of us. I would recommend this book to everyone but especially to history fans and those interested in ancient Egypt. Go read it now!

Immensely important yet problematic
The Queen of the Damned is strikingly different in both form and substance from the first two books of The Vampire Chronicles. Several new characters are introduced, a number of truly old vampires we have only heard of up until now become part of the action, and the story is woven together into a mosaic much more wide in scope from what has come before. This is essentially Lestat's book, but he is not really the focus of the tale; while he narrates his own role in events, much of the book is written in the third person. This, plus the addition of so many new characters and the truly elaborate scope that is covered, makes this novel much less cohesive than the first-person narratives of the first two books. The action is spread out over six thousand years from one end of the world to the other, with a lot of mythology and pondering taking the place of the thrilling, energetic action of the earlier novels.

The book begins a week or two before Lestat's legendary rock concert and the ensuing mayhem that erupted outside the auditorium on that night. We follow the paths of other vampires in the days prior to this, including Armand and Daniel, the young man from Interview With the Vampire. We also learn that the immolation of vampires that Lestat, Louis, and Gabrielle saw that night had actually begun several days earlier, as a number of covens were destroyed by Akasha, the newly awakened Queen of the Damned. After the story of her awakening is told, the book takes on a somewhat mystical air. Almost all vampires are dreaming of two red-headed young women preparing to feast upon their dead mother, only to be taken prisoner by soldiers while their village is destroyed around them. The true significance of the red-headed twins does not become clear until the final hundred pages of the book, for their tale is an integral part of the story behind vampirism's very existence. We already knew that Enkil and Akasha, ancient rulers of Egypt, were the first vampires. Now, the whole history of the King and Queen is revealed, including the curse that accompanied their transformation. Rice goes out of her way to explain the beginning of vampirism in a unique way, although the facts of the matter seem a little too elaborate and far-fetched to me.

The one real weakness I find in the novel is Akasha's agenda. She is not exactly the altruistic type, and her mission to save mankind sounds ingenuous at best. It is also a rather laughable plan; having spent the past six thousand years in contemplative thought, I would have expected a character of her strength and moxie to have come up with a plan much better than this one. The final conflict, one prefigured for hundreds of pages in the slow unveiling of the Legend of the Twins, ends so quickly I was forced to stop and make sure I hadn't somehow skipped a paragraph or two. Basically, it's all over in one sentence. Even Lestat is not himself here; I actually enjoyed the stories of the other vampires and the history of the accidental birth of vampirism in Akasha more than I enjoyed the action related first-hand by Lestat. Certainly, Rice is to be commended for vastly expanding her vampire universe and having her characters deeply examine their lives and their purposes on earth, but I just could not fully connect with this novel. Still, it is an essential book for Anne Rice fans, as it offers up loads of information about the vampires who roam the world of her creation and explains the very origins of vampirism itself.