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The Vampire Armand (Vampire Chronicles Series #6) by Anne Rice
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(Mass Market Paperback)
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Pub. Date: October 2000
- ISBN-13: 9780345434807
- Sales Rank: 9,520
- 480pp
- Series: Vampire Chronicles Series, #6
Synopsis
The Vampire Armand explores the fascinating story of its titular character and features such Rice favorites as Marius and to-die-for vamp Lestat. If you thought you saw the last of Armand in Memnoch the Devil, think again -- this expertly written undead melodrama is going to be Rice's biggest blockbuster in years.
Salon - Mary Elizabeth Williams
The nocturnal neck suckers of Anne Rice's world have, over the course of 22 years and half a dozen novels, survived fire, ice, Satan, Christians and Tom Cruise. But as they creak and creep toward the millennium, can they do the one thing vampires never seem to think about -- age gracefully? As a character, the vampire Armand is a fresh-faced youth, eternally suspended on the verge of manhood. As the latest in Rice's lucrative, fanatically anticipated chronicles, however, The Vampire Armand is beginning to look a little weathered.
Armand, the nubile Venetian, the living, breathing remnant of the high Renaissance, narrates his own story here, and his world-weary perspective is a subdued contrast to the bombast of Rice's usual hero, the egomaniacal rock star/French fop Lestat. A complicated, sexually ambiguous pretty boy with an evolving but perpetually twisted relationship to Christianity, Armand at times comes across as endearingly muddled as any modern teen. Unfortunately, he can also be just as irritating. He may be 500 years old, but Armand apparently still has neither the depth to passionately probe his religious mysteries with convincing fervor nor the sense of humor to see the ridiculousness of his quests.
Interview with the Vampire revolutionized the stale bat-wings-and-fangs vampire genre because it was edgy, sexy and perversely funny. But two decades on, Rice's readers now find themselves in a double bind of tedium-inducing traps. Those familiar with the series have already trod much of the same lore in prior novels, while newcomers will find a whole passel of plot holes, many hastily plugged in with Truman Show-style product placement for Rice's other books. The result is a literary terrain that once teemed with gloriously amoral immortals but is now cluttered with a mess of clunky exposition.
There are still moments when Rice appears to be having fun -- she can fill a scene with enough voluptuous descriptions of silk- and velvet-swathed surroundings to fill a year's worth of J. Peterman catalogs. And it takes nothing short of brass cojones to make literal the obvious parallels between Christian lore and horror. Jesus invites his followers to drink of his blood; Rice's night crawlers brashly take him up on the offer. But gorgeous scenery and cheeky mysticism can't help an unfocused plot, and they can't turn a great supporting character into a real hero. Armand, for all his travels and all his adventures, emerges as a boy meandering through history in a preternatural state of adolescent angst.
His ennui isn't helped by the addition of a progressively less engaging cast of side characters. Armand's colorful Renaissance coterie of artists, courtesans and occasional psychotics are eventually replaced by two human companions -- a slightly daft piano prodigy and a street-smart 12-year-old whose stomach for gore is the only thing keeping him from being the cute sidekick who winds up in Jim Belushi movies. Ultimately, though, it is title character Armand who is the book's biggest draw and its weakest link. The sad, beautiful youth, so mesmerizing in previous glimpses, is all tapped out here. The best parts of his story have already been revealed in Rice's earlier novels. What's left behind is a dour little Botticelli angel, colorless as a freshly drained corpse. It seems at long last, Armand and company are facing the inevitable pitfall of vampirism -- when you live forever, it's entirely possible you may eventually wear out your welcome.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Best known for The Vampire Chronicles, a series of dark, hypnotic novels steeped in Gothic horror, Anne Rice now applies her vivid storytelling skills to Christian fiction, most notably an acclaimed series based on the life of Christ.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
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- Ratings: 74Reviews: 48
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Boring - 0 starsby Anonymous
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September 17, 2008: Boring and disappointing. All of her male vampire characters have flamboyant homosexual traits and tendancies.
the vampire armandby Anonymous
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April 07, 2006: In the book, 'The Vampire Armand,' by Anne Rice, the antagonist is Armand. He's curious so he is always asking questions and is always willing to learn. He always listens to Marius, except when it comes to his drinking problem. The other main character is Marius, Armand's master. Marius is very to himself and independent. Armand and Marius have a strong relationship. Armand is like a real person. You can relate to him because he deals with real situations, that some people deal with, when it comes to his relationship with Marius. We get to know these characters through dialog and through their actions. This book is fiction. In this book Anne Rice uses flashback. The whole book is about Armand telling David his story of how he became a vampire. Since Marius is the one that made Armand a vampire he is the one teaching Armand how to act. Marius tells Armand the way he views life. Marius think that immortals should have patience with mortals because the mortals are going to die and immortals won't die. The setting of this story is important because this book is just one of the books of the vampire chronicles. If the setting was different then it would be confusing at some points. Like the way this story starts out the setting is important because it deals with something that happened to Lestat before. There are other setting that aren't so important, like when they go around to feast. The point of view is important in this story. It is being told in first person. It would not be able to be done in any other way because it is Armand telling his story. Since Armand is the narrator telling us his story he is a reliable narrator. One thing that I really didn't like in in this book is that Anne Rice goes into too much detail with the clothes that they're wearing. Details are important but i don't think we need to know so much about the clothes. Other than that I really enjoyed the book. I do recommend it to other readers. It is a really intersting and good book to read. I do recommend to first read the book ' Interview With The Vampire' because it does talk about some things from that book. If you don't read that book first you might get a little confused. It also talks a little bit about the vampire Pandora, so you can read her book first, but its not so important that you'll be confused without it.
Fact File
Name:
Anne Rice
Also Known As:
A. N. Roquelaure, Anne Rampling , Howard Allen O'Brien (birth name)
Current Home:
Rancho Mirage, California
Date of Birth:
October 04, 1941
Place of Birth:
Rancho Mirage, California
Education:
B.A., San Francisco State University, 1964; M.A., 1971
Biography
In 1976, nearly 80 years after Bram Stoker published Dracula, Anne Rice's bestselling first novel, Interview with the Vampire, reinvented the vampire myth. Rice recast the undead as a secret society of decadent aesthetes, alternately entranced by the world's beauty and haunted by spiritual despair. Set largely in the author's home city of New Orleans, the book created a fantasy underworld rich and compelling enough to sustain its writer and readers through nine sequels, known collectively as The Vampire Chronicles.
Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire, she said later, "without ever realizing I was writing about loss. I was writing about my daughter's loss [Rice's daughter died in 1972]. And I was writing about my loss of Catholic faith long before that, because I had lost my faith in the year 1960, when I first went to college."
After her first book, Rice continued to write about loss -- and about vampires, witches and demons -- for more than 25 years. She also wrote, under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, the Beauty series, an erotic retelling of the story of Sleeping Beauty; writing as Anne Rampling, she published two other novels, Exit to Eden and Belinda.
But it is as the queen of gothic fiction that Anne Rice's fans know her best. Her fans are passionate about her, and she returns the sentiment, e-mailing tirelessly with them and occasionally posting on their blogs. She also adores communing with them in person on book tours: "They give me personal, priceless and unforgettable feedback and verification of what I have achieved for them in my books," she once explained in a Salon interview.
After Blood Canticle was released in 1993, her readers, accustomed to an output of one book a year, kept asking her what was coming next. "And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'," she said in a Newsweek interview.
They were in for a surprise. In 1998, Rice had returned to the Roman Catholic Church, and in 2005 she published Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a novel about the childhood of Jesus, narrated by himself.
"It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's Slow Train Coming announced that he'd been born again," wrote David Gates in Newsweek.
But as Rice sees it, Christ the Lord represents the fulfillment of a longing that has been in her books, and in her soul, all along.
"This subject is in no way a departure from that of my previous works; no one who knows my work could possibly think so," she said in a Q&A on her publisher's Web site. "The whole theme of Interview with the Vampire was Louis's quest for meaning in a godless world. He searched to find the oldest existing ‘immortal' simply to ask ‘What is the meaning of what we are?' I was always compelled to seek the ‘big answers.'"
Christ the Lord received mixed reviews, but many critics were as impressed with the book's style as its ambitious subject matter. "Rice's book is a triumph of tone -- her prose lean, lyrical, vivid -- and character," noted Kirkus Reviews. Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Even in biblical times and in the Holy Land, Rice retains her obsessions with ritual and purification, with lavish detail and gaudy decor. But she writes this book in a simpler, leaner style, giving it the slow but inexorable rhythm of an incantation. The restraint and prayerful beauty of Christ the Lord is apt to surprise her usual readers and attract new ones."
Some of those usual readers, of course, are now wondering whether she will write any more vampire novels. Will the vampire Lestat ever return?
Anne's response, from her publisher's Web site: "I can't see myself doing that. My vampires were metaphors for the outsiders, the lost, the wanderers in the darkness who remembered the warmth of God's light but couldn't find it. My wish to explore that is gone now. I want to meet a much bigger challenge."
Good to Know
In our exlusive interview, Rice shared some fascinating stories with us:
"My first job was as a cafeteria waitress at a Walgreen's cafeteria over the drugstore on Canal and Baronne Street in New Orleans when I was sixteen years old. What a plunge into reality. Canal Street was then the only downtown in town. And I was in fact a boarding school student and unbeknownst to the principal, Sr. Felix, took this job on weekends. When she found out, she did not approve of a St. Joseph's Academy girl being a waitress. I was undeterred. I had discovered that I could turn time into money. I never forgot that lesson. The crashing boredom of childhood was over!"
"I was employed from then on a shocking variety of low level jobs, including grill cook at a huge downtown cafeteria in San Francisco. I had to be there at 5:00 a.m., and once while I was en route on a bus, a drunken man fell asleep against me. The conductor had to wake him up for me to get off, poor guy. I think he'd staggered out of an after hours club. I was a crack waitress, a receptionist, a claims examiner, a theatre usherette in a big Cinerama house, and must have seen It's Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World over one hundred times while standing there with a flashlight. My last job in the straight world -- after motherhood -- was that of proofreader for a law book company. I hated it. Then my devoted husband Stan, who was already teaching and had been for some time, said, 'Stay home and write, I believe in you.' And I wrote Interview with the Vampire."
"I was a painfully slow reader. Never really read a novel for pure pleasure until I was 35. It was Ordinary People by Judith Guest. Thought it very good."
"How do I unwind? There are different levels to unwind. The primo way for me is to read history or some form of involving scholarship. A good book on an obscure subject. The recent bestseller Krakatoa by Simon Winchester was a wonderful example! That's a delicious unwind book. And there are others out there like that. The British writers seem especially good at it. But I can't get enough on how or why the Roman Empire fell. That's my idea of a good evening. To be in Florida with the deck door open to the roar of the waves, and a good book open to pages on the decline of paganism."
"But! There is another kind of unwind. The gripping fiction bestseller that takes two days. The Da Vinci Code is a good example. Every now and then I have time for that. I was smiling all the way through it. At one time in my life, I had read everything I could find on the Knights Templar (see First Way to Unwind, above), and on Opus Dei, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and so I was just tickled by what the author did with the material. And of course, I couldn't stop reading. Such cleverness, such a puzzle and right up to the last page."
"Interest and hobbies: well, my interests are pretty much literary, except for maintaining two pre-Civil War houses in New Orleans (both family homes, one used for Mardi Gras season entertaining), and then I do devote some attention to my doll collection, which includes a small assortment of French antique dolls -- but this part of my life is drawing to a close. I am divesting myself of possessions rather than acquiring them. I am decorating, yes, and redecorating, but cutting down on the area, and the amount of things I have to maintain. I've let go of my huge property, St. Elizabeth's Orphanage -- a monster building which used to house my doll collection and so many other things. It was the fulfillment of dreams for about 10 years for me and so many other people. Weddings, book signings, book parties, benefits, fundraisers -- all kinds of events were held there. We even hosted President Clinton there. But that chapter of my life is over. For those ten years I asked 'what if?' many times. And I found out and as the result I am a satisfied person and a happy one. But it's over."
"I guess you could call my cats a hobby. I have five of them, all Siberians and very lovable and demanding and sweet. They are keepers certainly. Other than that, I don't know that I have hobbies so much as passions, and my passions center around my writing."
"My only other diversion of late is seeing that The Witching Hour will soon be made into a television limited series -- that is, a mini-series that will extend over 10 hours. The scripts that have been written by writer-producer John Wilder are very simply wonderful -- profoundly faithful to the material and the characters. Our producer, Mark Wolper, is extraordinarily dedicated and we have the network behind us. It looks very good."
"Other news looming is that Elton John and Rob Roth are making a musical based on the Vampire Chronicles for Broadway. I've talked to Elton John several times. He's absolutely charming. I've heard the first five songs, performed by him, and they were great. Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics, and will write the lyrics for all. The other people involved have top credits. The treatment I read was a wonder -- very true to the books, quite terrific. My conversation with Rob Roth was very exciting."
"What I've learned from both these experiences so far -- the television series and the Broadway production -- is that the passion of people makes all the difference in the world. And sometimes it is the passion of a few key people that moves a project forward. Sometimes one person alone goes to the hard work of getting everybody else together, and making the studio that owns the underlying rights respond. People who love the work, who want to make something of it, can be brought together by that one key person. That one key person has to believe that past disappointments or failed connections don't mean anything. When you have that sort of person, something can happen."
"I've also learned that the author of the books usually can't do it. Not unless she wants to stop being an author altogether and move to L.A. or N.Y. and become a producer."
Feature Interview
In the fall of 2003, Anne Rice took some time to talk with us about her favorite books, authors, and interests. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?
I find that answers to this question change with the season. Right now, I would say that Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens were the two books that most powerfully influenced me to write.
But at other times I come up with other answers. I can't underestimate the enormous power of Hemingway's writing on me when I was a young woman, or of Virginia Woolf or of what an effect Shakespeare had on me once I was able to wallow in his writing for pleasure. One whole summer of my life was given over to reading Anna Karenina out loud, and that was an immense influence. On the Road by Jack Kerouac greatly empowered me. I can't isolate one single book. Each book broke down walls for me. Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Lolita swept me off my feet. All of this went into the brew before I really hit my stride.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
Bear in mind that this is an "As of the Moment" list:
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
The Godfather -- Of course, the beginning of an era of American masterpieces that were equal to the earlier foreign films of the sixties.
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
I like many kinds of music, particularly baroque and classical, rock, and country and western. I never listen to music when writing. I have to hear the rhythm of my sentences. Music is too intoxicating for me to have it on most of the time. When I listen I surrender. I'm a huge fan of Beethoven, of Vivaldi, of Elvis.
If you had a book club, what would it be reading?
Dickens, of course, because he's too neglected now, and Kafka because more people need to know his short stories, and Hemingway's short stories because each and every one is genius, and people have forgotten that.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
Art books -- big lush books with full color illustrations, like books on Medieval altar pieces or on the works of Sodoma, or Cranach, or Andrea del Sarto or lesser known masters; books with big richly produced illustrations of the miniatures in medieval prayer books, books that deliver works of enduring value right into your hands and into your home, books that can lie on your desk, bedside table, etc.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
I have open books in archaeological layers, and it takes a digger to get through them, I tell you. What a mess, but it's the way I work, searching and piling, and compiling. I'm a writer who uses books, and I love allusions. There are lots of allusions in my work, and lots of thorough research. I have fun with it, always have.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
I developed slowly and in secret. My rejection slip period lasted nine months with the manuscript of Interview with the Vampire and involved five rejection slips, some of which were just hilariously negative. I just went right on pushing. I think I was fortunate. But I didn't really try to be published until I was thirty-four, and had a complete book in my hands. And then that complete book was rewritten and greatly expanded after its acceptance by Knopf.
My apprenticeship was really a private affair, during the years of my wandering from course to course as an unclassified graduate, reading widely and bumping into subjects at random, and typing away into the night, searching for my voice, and then "discovering" it in the character of my vampire hero, Louis. It was an eccentric path.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
Live and write as if you were already discovered. Demand respect and time for yourself as a writer as if you were already published and famous. Consider yourself a consummate professional even if you moonlight in a garage or at a kitchen table. This is how great writers are made.
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review
And That's Why the Teenager Is a Vamp
Luxurious — this is the best word I can think of to describe Anne Rice's hot-blooded fiction. The Vampire Armand follows in the path of her last novel, Pandora, in which Rice picked up with the tale of one of her vampire offspring from the epic Vampire Chronicles. With The Vampire Armand, Rice has now written what may be her most lush and moving novel. By concentrating solely on Armand, the eternal teenager with the wisdom of the ages, she has excavated one of the most fascinating characters in the literature of dark fantasy. Armand first appeared in Interview with the Vampire, as the emotional center of the frenzied Parisian vampires whom Louis encounters on his search for both his supernatural kin and his own lost soul. Armand was even then one of the intriguing ones, a child-man who understood Louis's dilemma but had given himself over to a period of debauchery and sadism. But later, in Rice's Memnoch the Devil, which often read — delightfully so — as Rice's stab at understanding a religious model of the universe, Armand took on a supplicant's role beneath the Vampire Lestat who sought the ultimate knowledge of the Divine.
Now Anne Rice treats us to the life and times of Armand, from his origins onward. The conceit here is the same as in Pandora. David Talbot, the psychic detective member of the Talamasca, wants to write Armand's tale down so others will know his legacy. Perhaps this is how Rice best invokes her muse, for when Armand begins his lively — and undead—story, the prose billows like a soft curtain in a perfumed breeze. The Vampire Armand is riveting and beautiful.
Armand's young life was anything but gentle. When the Turks took over his homeland, he was forced into slavery, and as a preternaturally pretty boy — these were, after all, the ancient Turks — he was condemned to service in brothels. Armand doesn't mince words, and Rice, to her credit, doesn't romanticize his childhood up to this point. While Armand doesn't recount rape scenes in excruciating detail, he makes it clear that it was a brutal experience. But then, when a mysterious and rich man from Venice buys Armand for his household, Armand's life changes.
The man, known as Master to the young boy, is none other than Marius, possibly the most captivating and intriguing of Rice's pantheon of vampiric beings. Wealthy beyond measure, delighting in the sensual and erotic, Marius is smitten with the young boy from Kiev. Armand's name becomes Amadeo, "beloved of God," and Marius is in many ways Armand's only god. As Marius seeks to train the boy in the arts of love and lust, other people crowd into their life together in Venice. Included in this is the seductive and intelligent Bianca, a courtesan who is as adept at poisoning as she is at lovemaking, and the Earl of Harlech, a lusty Englishman who intends to possess Armand for himself or cut him to pieces. A highlight of the book is a scene in which Marius takes the still-mortal Armand to a den of upper-class rogues as they celebrate a feast. Marius toys with the guests, offering Armand up as a kind of bauble for them to bid on. But Marius drinks the life from each guest, one by one, until the score of vengeance is settled. It is a testament to Rice's erotic sensibility and artistry that she manages to make these dark, disturbing moments both terrifying and alluring without being repulsive.
As Rice spreads her canvas far and wide, we learn more of Armand's origins, of the secrets he carries, and, in that fateful change when he receives his Dark Gift, we share with him the beautiful and destructive world of the vampire. The Vampire Armand is easily Anne Rice's best vampire novel since The Vampire Lestat.
— Douglas Clegg, barnesandnoble.com
From the Publisher
In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice brings us the mesmerizing story of the eternally young Armand—who first appeared in all his dark glory in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire. . . .
Salon - Mary Elizabeth Williams
The nocturnal neck suckers of Anne Rice's world have, over the course of 22 years and half a dozen novels, survived fire, ice, Satan, Christians and Tom Cruise. But as they creak and creep toward the millennium, can they do the one thing vampires never seem to think about -- age gracefully? As a character, the vampire Armand is a fresh-faced youth, eternally suspended on the verge of manhood. As the latest in Rice's lucrative, fanatically anticipated chronicles, however, The Vampire Armand is beginning to look a little weathered.
Armand, the nubile Venetian, the living, breathing remnant of the high Renaissance, narrates his own story here, and his world-weary perspective is a subdued contrast to the bombast of Rice's usual hero, the egomaniacal rock star/French fop Lestat. A complicated, sexually ambiguous pretty boy with an evolving but perpetually twisted relationship to Christianity, Armand at times comes across as endearingly muddled as any modern teen. Unfortunately, he can also be just as irritating. He may be 500 years old, but Armand apparently still has neither the depth to passionately probe his religious mysteries with convincing fervor nor the sense of humor to see the ridiculousness of his quests.
Interview with the Vampire revolutionized the stale bat-wings-and-fangs vampire genre because it was edgy, sexy and perversely funny. But two decades on, Rice's readers now find themselves in a double bind of tedium-inducing traps. Those familiar with the series have already trod much of the same lore in prior novels, while newcomers will find a whole passel of plot holes, many hastily plugged in with Truman Show-style product placement for Rice's other books. The result is a literary terrain that once teemed with gloriously amoral immortals but is now cluttered with a mess of clunky exposition.
There are still moments when Rice appears to be having fun -- she can fill a scene with enough voluptuous descriptions of silk- and velvet-swathed surroundings to fill a year's worth of J. Peterman catalogs. And it takes nothing short of brass cojones to make literal the obvious parallels between Christian lore and horror. Jesus invites his followers to drink of his blood; Rice's night crawlers brashly take him up on the offer. But gorgeous scenery and cheeky mysticism can't help an unfocused plot, and they can't turn a great supporting character into a real hero. Armand, for all his travels and all his adventures, emerges as a boy meandering through history in a preternatural state of adolescent angst.
His ennui isn't helped by the addition of a progressively less engaging cast of side characters. Armand's colorful Renaissance coterie of artists, courtesans and occasional psychotics are eventually replaced by two human companions -- a slightly daft piano prodigy and a street-smart 12-year-old whose stomach for gore is the only thing keeping him from being the cute sidekick who winds up in Jim Belushi movies. Ultimately, though, it is title character Armand who is the book's biggest draw and its weakest link. The sad, beautiful youth, so mesmerizing in previous glimpses, is all tapped out here. The best parts of his story have already been revealed in Rice's earlier novels. What's left behind is a dour little Botticelli angel, colorless as a freshly drained corpse. It seems at long last, Armand and company are facing the inevitable pitfall of vampirism -- when you live forever, it's entirely possible you may eventually wear out your welcome.
Publishers Weekly
Fantasy's great advantage is that authors can make anything happen -- even rewriting their own stories, as Rice does here. Readers of her 1995 novel, Memnoch the Devil, will recall that the vampire Armand ended his existence by stepping into the sun. Since he was a popular character from earlier tales, a resounding protest from fans followed. In response, Rice concocted a way in this, her seventh Vampire Chronicle since Interview with the Vampire (1976), to raise Armand from the dead. He is, in fact, the narrator of this story, in which he looks back on his earthly existence, revisiting his apprenticeship in 16th-century Venice to the regal vampire artist, Marius De Romanus, who saved his life with the kiss of immortality. Afterward, Armand returned to his Russian homeland, but when disaster parted him from Marius, he became the nihilistic leader of a pack of Parisian vampires. Rice offers exquisite details of erotic romps and political intrigues while reprising other material familiar to her fans, but finally returns to the pressing question of what happened to Armand in the sun's lethal rays. She supplies a vivid and resonant description of the experience, set against the counterpoint of Beethoven's Appassionata. Unfortunately, she dims the effect by dragging Armand through rambling scenes involving two odd children, Sybelle and Benji. Otherwise, this is a lavishly poetic recital in which Armand struggles with the fragility of religious belief. The final scene is a stunner.
Library Journal
This sixth installment in Rice's ongoing supernatural soap opera is the most satisfying in years. While protagonist Armand has appeared throughout the series, he's played mostly minor roles. Here, however, we get his full history. Set mostly against the perfect backdrop of Old-World Venice, Armand's life unfolds in rich, velvety prose, beginning with his kidnapping as a lad from the Russian wilderness and moving on to his tutelage under the powerful blood-drinker Marius and consequent rebirth as a vampire of light and then darkness. Rice concentrates a good deal on the physical, and all her characters appear young, beautiful -- and treacherous (think Melrose Place with fangs). Armand himself is comely to the point of femininity. Typically, there are large doses of Christian theology and homoerotic sex, and Rice recycles many characters and plot lines from earlier episodes. Unfortunately, the book flounders when it returns to the present in order to lay the groundwork for the inevitable next installment. Nonetheless, this is a sumptuous addition to the series which fans will drain to the last drop.
-- Michael Rogers
The New York Times Book Review - Michael Porter
. . .[T]he end of this uneven by enjoyable story is surely only the prelude to another. Stay tuned.
People Magazine - Nick Charles
. . .Rice. . .revisits too much familiar material . . .
Barcelona Review - Michael Garry Smout
Rice is not that helpful on background information, possibly knowing that only hardcore fans would pick this up anyway....Thumbs down on this one. Read Interview and drive a stake through the rest.
Kirkus Reviews
Here continues the stories of Armand, first met in Interview with the Vampire, and Marius, encountered in the ancient Rome of Pandora and still alive in New Orleans, where he tends the comatose body of top vampire Lestat, who's returned from Heaven and Hell with Veronica's Veil (Memnoch the Devil). The young Armand, first given the dark gift 500 years ago by Marius, still looks as boyish as a Botticelli angel and remains in thrall to Marius, who's trying to fathom the long sleep of Lestat and perhaps woo the unwilling Armand away from his two mortal children: dark-haired little Benji, an Arab boy, and the tender, willowy Sybelle. When the recently befanged and elderly scholar David Talbot, Superior General of the Talamasca, an order of psychic detectives, shows up, he is no longer old but has switched to a young body and coaxes Armand (as he did 2,000-year-old Pandora) to relate his memoirs to him. With vague memories of spending his boyhood in Kiev Rus, Armand awoke as an amnesiac boy in Istanbul many centuries ago as slave or captive, and was sold into Venice, where Marius, a great Renaissance painter with a taste for lavish living, took him as a special member of his harem of boys, making him a sex slave. By day, Marius disappears, returns to paint by night, and at last grants Armand eternal life. He educates him in history, philosophy, and the law. Then the Children of Darkness, vampires who kill for God, burn the palazzo and paintings, burn Marius and his harem, and capture Armand. Marius, of course, is not really dead. Eventually, all turns on Armand's love for Benji and Sybelle, on Rice's lush reading of Beethoven's Appassionata piano sonata, and on adreamy awakening of Lestat as Christ. Rice at her ripest, with research easily absorbed by the voluptuous text, though she fawns over her weaker, or more sentimental, moments.
Loading...Product Details
- ISBN:
0345434803
- ISBN-13: 9780345434807
- Format: Mass Market Paperback, 480pp
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Pub. Date: October 2000
- Sales Rank: 9,520
- Series: Vampire Chronicles Series, #6
Table of Contents
Interviews & Essays
On Wednesday, October 21, 1998, barnesandnoble.com welcomed Anne Rice, author of THE VAMPIRE ARMAND.
Moderator: On October 21, 1998, barnesandnoble.com was pleased to bring Anne Rice back to our Authors@aol series for another chat. One of the country's most widely read and celebrated writers, Anne Rice is author of the Vampire Chronicles series, three books on the lives of the Mayfair Witches, and many other novels. Her latest novel is THE VAMPIRE ARMAND.
LeightonBN: Ms. Rice, welcome back. We had so much fun last time, we had to invite you once more.
Anne Rice: I'm very happy to be here!
LeightonBN: Ready to open the floodgates?
Anne Rice: Absolutely ready!
Question: I was wondering -- if it's not too personal -- what your own religious beliefs are, and how you feel that they come across in your work?
Anne Rice: I think my religious beliefs are completely expressed in my work. I identify completely with Lestat at the end of MEMNOCH THE DEVIL. And I identify as well with Armand at the end of THE VAMPIRE ARMAND.
Question: What inspired you to use the "Apassionata" as Armand's song?
Anne Rice: I make choices like that instinctively. I love the "Apassionata" sonata, and it struck me as exactly the right music for Syvelle. I was obsessed with it, so she became obsessed with it.
Question: Have you heard of this fringe phenomenon among youth of living as vampires -- sleeping in coffins, getting fanglike dental implants, ingesting blood, etc.? What are your thoughts on it?
Anne Rice: I've heard a lot about the readers getting their own dental implants, and I think that's a lot of fun. I think sleeping in coffins is fine -- what's wrong with that? When it comes to ingesting blood, I can't give my approval to that, and I can't recommend it. It's too dangerous.
Question: When you finished MEMNOCH THE DEVIL, had you decided then that Armand would live, even though the book made him look as if he had died?
Anne Rice: I had made no clear decision. I deliberately planned it so that there would be no witnesses to Memnoch's death. There couldn't be any vampire witnesses; people would only see a burst of flame. I kind of knew he survived, but my thoughts weren't clear.
Question: Hi, Anne! I'm Danielle. I'm the one who threw the doll up to you at the Halloween party last year. Remember? The drunk blonde girl! (LOL) I just wanted to ask why you shut down your tours in New Orleans? I loved them.
Anne Rice: Danielle, I remember you! [laughs] I shut down the tours because their purpose was completely misunderstood in the press. I was trying to provide access to New Orleans because I love it. The tours also provided work for New Orleanians, but this was completely misunderstood by the press, who criticized me for being exploitative. In bitter disappointment, I closed them down. My home is open every Monday to the public from 1 to 3pm at no charge. I don't see how the press can criticize this.
Question: Hello, Anne. You are wonderful! I am really enjoying ARMAND, and I have two quick questions. How old was he when Marius embraced him (it's an ongoing debate), and why was Armand's transformation so different from that of all the other vampires?
Anne Rice: Armand's age actually shifts about in my mind. I think he was about 17 when Marius made him a vampire. However, he is often described as looking like a 15-year-old by others who've seen him. His transformation was spectacular because Marius in his wisdom made him so. He made the process as drawn out as he could possibly make it so that Armand would have the maximum mythical and physical knowledge when he was finished. Armand had the time to read his own past and see numerous visions while he was being made a vampire.
Question: What do you think of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer"?
Anne Rice: I haven't seen the TV series at all, but I thought that the movie was very funny, and I thought that Buffy was very cute.
Question: What Vampire Chronicles characters might feature in another major novel soon?
Anne Rice: I hesitate to say, but I have a good feeling that it might be the Vampire Lestat.
Question: Are you considering in any of your upcoming novels making San Francisco the main setting?
Anne Rice: It's been ten years since I lived in San Francisco. I doubt it will ever be a main setting in any of my novels. I travel every chance I get, and I love to use new sites like Rio de Janeiro and Rome and Florence, Italy, and Paris and other such places that I have visited.
Question: Is there another movie in the works, and if so, when can we expect to see it?
Anne Rice: Right now James Cameron, the director of "Titanic," owns the rights to THE MUMMY. Write to Jim! As regards the Vampire Chronicles, the situation is tragic. There is no real development going on at Warner Bros. on any book of the Chronicles. Write to Warners, please! Tell them how much you want to see a movie based on the Chronicles. Maybe it will do some good.
Question: I understand that you have done a lot of research on the after-life that has made you comfortable with death. What were the most helpful books that you have read on the subject?
Anne Rice: The most helpful writer was Dannion Brinkley. Dannion videotapes and books were absolutely convincing that there is life after death. I was also inspired by the books of Raymond Moody. I have read anthologies of accounts by people who have had near-death experiences, and the material is very convincing.
Question: Ms. Rice, I can't wait to start reading ARMAND. I bought it today. I was wondering, what is your earliest recollection of writing, and what is the first story you ever wrote about? Did you always have an interest in the supernatural?
Anne Rice: I always had an interest in what's called speculative fiction. The first story I ever wrote was actually a novel about two people coming here from Mars. It was from the Martian point of view. It was very dramatic and very tragic. I was in the fifth grade in grammar school at the time.
Question: You've been very public with your support for the President. Has that changed since the Lewinsky affair emerged?
Anne Rice: I still completely support President Clinton. I think the Republican Party are making fools of themselves. The President has been outstanding. Monica Lewinsky is a self-centered, gossipy trophy hunter. She has no regards for the President, Mrs. Clinton, Chelsea, and the office of the President. I will never vote for anyone who participates in persecuting the President.
Question: Where did the name Khayman come from? I have named my son after him and would love to know the origin.
Anne Rice: I know of no origin for the name except my own imagination. It sounded like an ancient name to me, with possible origins in Ancient Egypt, and I went with my instincts.
Question: Do you think feminism has taken a regressive turn in the last ten years?
Anne Rice: I don't know what that means. I think feminism has always been divided. Some feminists want to protect women at the cost of their rights. Others want to see women more and more get their rights. The protectionists have always angered me with their puritanical attitudes. I want women to have equality with men. Monica Lewinsky should apologize to Mrs. Clinton.
Question: You've shown yourself to be a fan of Tom Cruise, at least so far as "Interview with the Vampire" is concerned. Have you heard anything about his new Stanley Kubrick picture, which has been such a closely guarded secret?
Anne Rice: I have heard nothing about it. I only know that they're still working on it.
Question: Do you think there's less room than in the past for myth and lore in this technical, rationalists' world? Is there a greater need for it in response? Does this account, in part, for your books' success?
Anne Rice: I think that right now, the public is desperate for myth and lore. They need meaningful, fantastic fiction. There is no contradiction there between fantastic and meaningful. For 1,500 years, the Christian West and the Jewish West have told tales of the supernatural, magic, and meaning. Pedestrian fiction will probably have a very short tenure.
Question: In the book CRY TO HEAVEN, did you create Christina to be what you thought your daughter would have been at that age? I noticed that the physical description was very similar to your daughter. Maybe you thought she would be a painter like your husband.
Anne Rice: I never thought of it. It never crossed my mind. But it's a lovely thought.
Question: Hi, Anne! The vampires' theory of God and religion is very interesting. Is this based on your own theology?
Anne Rice: Yes, completely. My questions about God and the Devil are the same as Armand's questions and Lestat's questions.
Question: Is James Cameron still set to direct THE MUMMY?
Anne Rice: We haven't heard from Jim in a while. We feel that right now the best thing to do would be to give him some space. "Titanic" was a true titanic success, and Jim must be facing many opportunities.
Question: Hi, Anne! I was wondering if you need to be alone to write or if ideas come better when you are with other people.
Anne Rice: Ideas come all the time; they're no respecters of crowds. But I like to write alone in a room by myself.
Question: When is the movie THE VAMPIRE LESTAT coming out? Is it coming out? --Jessy
Anne Rice: There may never be such a movie as long as Warner Bros. has a stranglehold on Lestat. They don't want to make a movie based on that book. As far as I know, Warner Bros. has no respect for me or the readers. But if they don't make something soon, they will lose their rights to the Vampire Chronicles. That's what I pray for -- I pray for the books to come back to me in the year 2000. My worst fear is that they will make a trashy film using the characters' names with an original story of their own, not based on any of the books. If you fear this as much as I do, please write to them and tell them what you think. Write to Lorenzo Bonaventura.
Question: Do you think you've become something of a cult of personality among your fans?
Anne Rice: Yes, I do, and I rather enjoy it! And I regard the whole thing very highly; I love my readers. They're the only ones I know that have never told me to shut up!
Question: Bonsoir, Madame Anne Rice. Je vous aime! My name is Lionel, and I am a young Frenchman who loves you since 1990. My favorite character ever is Louis. I see him as the personification of the best part of my inner self. Is there a chance that we get more of him?
Anne Rice: Bonsoir, Lionel! I think Louis will always be in the novels, but it's unlikely that he'll have his own novel...I don't know.
LeightonBN: Ms. Rice, thanks for joining us. Any closing comments?
Anne Rice: First of all, let me thank you all for having me on and letting me talk to the readers. And lastly, let me express my grief over the death of the young gay man Matthew Shepard in Wyoming recently. This was a horrible crime -- an unspeakable crime. If we could just have a brief second of silence for Matthew, I think that would be a good thing.
[moment of silence]
Thanks very much, again.
LeightonBN: Ms. Rice, thanks so much for your company. We hope to see you again.
Anne Rice: Oh, it was great! I want to come back!
LeightonBN: Goodnight.
Anne Rice: Goodnight!
Read an Excerpt
They said a child had died in the attic. Her clothes had been discovered in the wall.
I wanted to go up there, and to lie down near the wall, and be alone.
They'd seen her ghost now and then, the child. But none of these vampires could see spirits, really, at least not the way that I could see them. No matter. It wasn't the company of the child I wanted. It was to be in that place.
Nothing more could be gained from lingering near Lestat. I'd come. I'd fulfilled my purpose. I couldn't help him.
The sight of his sharply focused and unchanging eyes unnerved me, and I was quiet inside and full of love for those nearest me—my human children, my dark-haired little Benji and my tender willowy Sybelle—but I was not strong enough just yet to take them away.
I left the chapel.
I didn't even take note of who was there. The whole convent was now the dwelling place of vampires. It was not an unruly place, or a neglected place, but I didn't notice who remained in the chapel when I left.
Lestat lay as he had all along, on the marble floor of the chapel in front of the huge crucifix, on his side, his hands slack, the left hand just below the right hand, its fingers touching the marble lightly, as if with a purpose, when there was no purpose at all. The fingers of his right hand curled, making a little hollow in the palm where the light fell, and that too seemed to have a meaning, but there was no meaning.
This was simply the preternatural body lying there without will or animation, no more purposeful than the face, its expression almost defiantly intelligent, given that months had passed in which Lestat had not moved.
The highstained-glass windows were dutifully draped for him before sunrise. At night, they shone with all the wondrous candles scattered about the fine statues and relics which filled this once sanctified and holy place. Little mortal children had heard Mass under this high coved roof; a priest had sung out the Latin words from an altar.
It was ours now. It belonged to him—Lestat, the man who lay motionless on the marble floor.
Man. Vampire. Immortal. Child of Darkness. Any and all are excellent words for him.
Looking over my shoulder at him, I never felt so much like a child.
That's what I am. I fill out the definition, as if it were encoded in me perfectly, and there had never been any other genetic design.
I was perhaps seventeen years old when Marius made me into a vampire. I had stopped growing by that time. For a year, I'd been five feet six inches. My hands are as delicate as those of a young woman, and I was beardless, as we used to say in that time, the years of the sixteenth century. Not a eunuch, no, not that, most certainly, but a boy.
It was fashionable then for boys to be as beautiful as girls. Only now does it seem something worthwhile, and that's because I love the others—my own: Sybelle with her woman's breasts and long girlish limbs, and Benji with his round intense little Arab face.
I stood at the foot of the stairs. No mirrors here, only the high brick walls stripped of their plaster, walls that were
old only for America, darkened by the damp even inside the convent, all textures and elements here softened by the simmering summers of New Orleans and her clammy crawling winters, green winters I call them because the trees here are almost never bare.
I was born in a place of eternal winter when one compares it to this place. No wonder in sunny Italy I forgot the beginnings altogether, and fashioned my life out of the present of my years with Marius. "I don't remember." It was a condition of loving so much vice, of being so addicted to Italian wine and sumptuous meals, and even the feel of the warm marble under my bare feet when the rooms of the palazzo were sinfully, wickedly heated by Marius's exorbitant fires.
His mortal friends . . . human beings like me at that time . . . scolded constantly about these expenditures: firewood, oil, candles. And for Marius only the finest candles of beeswax were acceptable. Every fragrance was significant.
Stop these thoughts. Memories can't hurt you now. You came here for a reason and now you have finished, and you must find those you love, your young mortals, Benji and Sybelle, and you must go on.
Life was no longer a theatrical stage where Banquo's ghost came again and again to seat himself at the grim table.
My soul hurt.
Up the stairs. Lie for a little while in this brick convent where the child's clothes were found. Lie with the child, murdered here in this convent, so say the rumormongers, the vampires who haunt these halls now, who have come to see the great Vampire Lestat in his Endymionlike sleep.
I felt no murder here, only the tender voices of nuns.
I went up the staircase, letting my body find its human weight and human tread.
After five hundred years, I know such tricks. I could frighten all the young ones—the hangers-on and the gawkers—just as surely as the other ancient ones did it, even the most modest, uttering words to evince their telepathy, or vanishing when they chose to leave, or now and then even making the building tremble with their power—an interesting accomplishment even with these walls eighteen inches thick with cypress sills that will never rot.
He must like the fragrances here, I thought. Marius, where is he? Before I had visited Lestat, I had not wanted to talk very much to Marius, and had spoken only a few civil words when I left my treasures in his charge.
After all, I had brought my children into a menagerie of the Undead. Who better to safeguard them than my beloved Marius, so powerful that none here dared question his smallest request.
There is no telepathic link between us naturally—Marius made me, I am forever his fledgling—but as soon as this occurred to me, I realized without the aid of this telepathic link that I could not feel the presence of Marius in the building. I didn't know what had happened in that brief interval when I knelt down to look at Lestat. I didn't know where Marius was. I couldn't catch the familiar human scents of Benji or Sybelle. A little stab of panic paralyzed me.
I stood on the second story of the building. I leaned against the wall, my eyes settling with determined calm on the deeply varnished heart pine floor. The light made pools of yellow on the boards.
Where were they, Benji and Sybelle? What had I done in bringing them here, two ripe and glorious humans? Benji was a spirited boy of twelve, Sybelle, a womanling of twenty-five. What if Marius, so generous in his own soul, had carelessly let them out of his sight?
"I'm here, young one." The voice was abrupt, soft, welcome.
My Maker stood on the landing just below me, having come up the steps behind me, or more truly, with his powers, having placed himself there, covering the preceding distance with silent and invisible speed.
"Master," I said with a little trace of a smile. "I was afraid for them for a moment." It was an apology. "This place makes me sad."
He nodded. "I have them, Armand," he said. "The city seethes with mortals. There's food enough for all the vaga-
bonds wandering here. No one will hurt them. Even if I weren't here to say so, no one would dare."
It was I who nodded now. I wasn't so sure, really. Vampires are by their very nature perverse and do wicked and terrible things simply for the sport of it. To kill another's mortal pet would be a worthy entertainment for some grim and alien creature, skirting the fringes here, drawn by remarkable events.
"You're a wonder, young one," he said to me smiling. Young one! Who else would call me this but Marius, my Maker, and what is five hundred years to him? "You went into the sun, child," he continued with the same legible concern written on his kind face. "And you lived to tell the tale."
"Into the sun, Master?" I questioned his words. But I myself did not want to reveal any more. I did not want to talk yet, to tell of what had happened, the legend of Veronica's Veil and the Face of Our Lord emblazoned upon it, and the morning when I had given up my soul with such perfect happiness. What a fable it was.
He came up the steps to be near me, but kept a polite distance. He has always been the gentleman, even before there was such a word. In ancient Rome, they must have had a term for such a person, infallibly good mannered, and considerate as a point of honor, and wholly successful at common courtesy to rich and poor alike. This was Marius, and it had always been Marius, insofar as I could know.
He let his snow-white hand rest on the dull satiny banister. He wore a long shapeless cloak of gray velvet, once perfectly extravagant, now downplayed with wear and rain, and his yellow hair was long like Lestat's hair, full of random light and unruly in the damp, and even studded with drops of dew from outside, the same dew clinging to his golden eyebrows and darkening his long curling eyelashes around his large cobalt-blue eyes.
There was something altogether more Nordic and icy about him than there was about Lestat, whose hair tended more to golden, for all its luminous highlights, and whose eyes were forever prismatic, drinking up the colors around him, becoming even a gorgeous violet with the slightest provocation from the worshipful outside world.
In Marius, I saw the sunny skies of the northern wilderness, eyes of steady radiance which rejected any outside color, perfect portals to his own most constant soul.
"Armand," he said. "I want you to come with me."
"Where is that, Master, come where?" I asked. I too wanted to be civil. He had always, even after a struggle of wits, brought such finer instincts out of me.
"To my house, Armand, where they are now, Sybelle and Benji. Oh, don't fear for them for a second. Pandora's with them. They are rather astonishing mortals, brilliant, remarkably different, yet alike. They love you, and they know so much and have come with you rather a long way."
I flushed with blood and color; the warmth was stinging and unpleasant, and then as the blood danced back away from the surface of my face, I felt cooler and strangely enervated that I felt any sensations at all.
It was a shock being here and I wanted it to be over.
"Master, I don't know who I am in this new life," I said gratefully. "Reborn? Confused?" I hesitated, but there was no use stopping it. "Don't ask me to stay here just now. Maybe some time when Lestat is himself again, maybe when enough time has passed—. I don't know for certain, only that I can't accept your kind invitation now."
He gave me a brief accepting nod. With his hand he made a little acquiescent gesture. His old gray cloak had slipped off one shoulder. He seemed not to care about it. His thin black wool clothes were neglected, lapels and pockets trimmed in a careless gray dust. That was not right for him.
He had a big shock of white silk at his throat that made his pale face seem more colored and human than it otherwise would. But the silk was torn as if by brambles. In sum, he haunted the world in these clothes, rather than was dressed in them. They were for a stumbler, not my old Master.
I think he knew I was at a loss. I was looking up at the gloom above me. I wanted to reach the attic of this place, the half-concealed clothing of the dead child. I wondered at this story of the dead child. I had the impertinence to let my mind drift, though he was waiting.
He brought me back with his gentle words:
"Sybelle and Benji will be with me when you want them," he said. "You can find us. We aren't far. You'll hear the Appassionata when you want to hear it." He smiled.
"You've given her a piano," I said. I spoke of golden Sybelle. I had shut out the world from my preternatural hearing, and I didn't want just yet to unstop my ears even for the lovely sound of her playing, which I already missed overly much.
As soon as we'd entered the convent, Sybelle had seen a piano and asked in a whisper at my ear if she could play it. It was not in the chapel where Lestat lay, but off in another long empty room. I had told her it wasn't quite proper, that it might disturb Lestat as he lay there, and we couldn't know what he thought, or what he felt, or if he was anguished and trapped in his own dreams.
"Perhaps when you come, you'll stay for a while," Marius said. "You'll like the sound of her playing my piano, and maybe then we'll talk together, and you can rest with us, and we can share the house for as long as you like."
I didn't answer.
"It's palatial in a New World sort of way," he said with a little mockery in his smile. "It's not far at all. I have the most spacious gardens and old oaks, oaks far older than those even out there on the Avenue, and all the windows are doors. You know how I like it that way. It's the Roman style. The house is open to the spring rain, and the spring rain here is like a dream."
"Yes, I know," I whispered. "I think it's falling now, isn't it?" I smiled.
"Well, I'm rather spattered with it, yes," he said almost gaily. "You come when you want to. If not tonight, then tomorrow . . ."
"Oh, I'll be there tonight," I said. I didn't want to offend him, not in the slightest, but Benji and Sybelle had seen enough of white-faced monsters with velvet voices. It was time to be off.
I looked at him rather boldly, enjoying it for a moment, overcoming a shyness that had been our curse in this modern world. In Venice of old, he had gloried in his clothes as men did then, always so sharp and splendidly embellished, the glass of fashion, to use the old graceful phrase. When he crossed the Piazza San Marco in the soft purple of evening, all turned to watch him pass. Red had been his badge of pride, red velvet—a flowing cape, and magnificently embroidered doublet, and beneath it a tunic of gold silk tissue, so very popular in those times.
He'd had the hair of a young Lorenzo de' Medici, right from the painted wall.
"Master, I love you, but now I must be alone," I said. "You don't need me now, do you, Sir? How can you? You never really did." Instantly I regretted it. The words, not the tone, were impudent. And our minds being so divided by intimate blood, I was afraid he'd misunderstand.
"Cherub, I want you," he said forgivingly. "But I can wait. Seems not long ago I spoke these same words when we were together, and so I say them again."
I couldn't bring myself to tell him it was my season for mortal company, how I longed just to be talking away the night with little Benji, who was such a sage, or listening to my beloved Sybelle play her sonata over and over again. It seemed beside the point to explain any further. And the sadness came over me again, heavily and undeniably, of having come to this forlorn and empty convent where Lestat lay, unable or unwilling to move or speak, none of us knew.
"Nothing will come of my company just now, Master," I said. "But you will grant me some key to finding you, surely, so that when this time passes . . ." I let my words die.
"I fear for you!" he whispered suddenly, with great warmth.
"Any more than ever before, Sir?" I asked.
He thought for a moment. Then he said, "Yes. You love two mortal children. They are your moon and stars. Come stay with me if only for a little while. Tell me what you think of our Lestat and what's happened. Tell me perhaps, if I promise to remain very quiet and not to press you, tell me your opinion of all you've so recently seen."
"You touch on it delicately, Sir, I admire you. You mean why did I believe Lestat when he said he had been to Heaven and Hell, you mean what did I see when I looked at the relic he brought back with him, Veronica's Veil."
"If you want to tell me. But more truly, I wish you would come and rest."
I put my hand on top of his, marveling that in spite of all I'd endured, my skin was almost as white as his.
"You will be patient with my children till I come, won't you?" I asked. "They imagine themselves so intrepidly wicked, coming here to be with me, whistling nonchalantly in the crucible of the Undead, so to speak."
"Undead," he said, smiling reprovingly. "Such language, and in my presence. You know I hate it."
He planted a kiss quickly on my cheek. It startled me, and then I realized that he was gone.
"Old tricks!" I said aloud, wondering if he were still near enough to hear me, or whether he had shut up his ears to me as fiercely as I shut mine to the outside world.
I looked off, wanting the quiet, dreaming of bowers suddenly, not in words but in images, the way my old mind would do it, wanting to lie down in garden beds among growing flowers, wanting to press my face to earth and sing softly to myself.
The spring outside, the warmth, the hovering mist that would be rain. All this I wanted. I wanted the swampy forests beyond, but I wanted Sybelle and Benji, too, and to be gone, and to have some will to carry on.
Ah, Armand, you always lack this very thing, the will. Don't let the old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself with all that's happened.
Another was nearby.
It seemed so awful to me suddenly, that some immortal whom I didn't know should intrude here on my random private thoughts, perhaps to make a selfish approximation of what I felt.
It was only David Talbot.
He came from the chapel wing, through the bridge rooms of the convent that connect it to the main building where I stood at the top of the staircase to the second floor.
I saw him come into the hallway. Behind him was the glass of the door that led to the gallery, and beyond that the soft mingled gold and white light of the courtyard below.
"It's quiet now," he said. "And the attic's empty and you know that you can go there, of course."
"Go away," I said. I felt no anger, only the honest wish to have my thoughts unread and my emotions left alone.
With remarkable self-possession he ignored me, then said:
"Yes, I am afraid of you, a little, but then terribly curious too."
"Oh, I see, so that excuses it, that you followed me here?"
"I didn't follow you, Armand," he said. "I live here."
"Ah, I'm sorry then," I admitted. "I hadn't known. I suppose I'm glad of it. You guard him. He's never alone." I meant Lestat of course.
"Everyone's afraid of you," he said calmly. He had taken up a position only a few feet away, casually folding his arms. "You know, it's quite a study, the lore and habits of the
vampires."
"Not to me," I said.
"Yes, I realize that," he said. "I was only musing, and I hope you'll forgive me. It was about the child in the attic, the child they said was murdered. It's a tall story, about a very small little person. Maybe if your luck is better than that of everyone else, you'll see the ghost of the child whose clothes were shut up in the wall."
"Do you mind if I look at you?" I said. "I mean if you're going to dip your beak into my mind with such abandon? We met some time ago before all this happened—Lestat, the Heavenly Journey, this place. I never really took stock of you. I was indifferent, or too polite, I don't know which."
I was surprised to hear such heat in my voice. I was volatile, and it wasn't David Talbot's fault.
"I'm thinking of the conventional knowledge about you," I said. "That you weren't born in this body, that you were an elderly man when Lestat knew you, that this body you inhabit now belonged to a clever soul who could hop from living being to living being, and there set up shop with his own trespassing soul."
He gave me a rather disarming smile.
"So Lestat said," he answered. "So Lestat wrote. It's true, of course. You know it is. You've known since you saw me before."
"Three nights we spent together," I said. "And I never really questioned you. I mean I never really even looked directly into your eyes."
"We were thinking of Lestat then."
"Aren't we now?"
"I don't know," he said.
"David Talbot," I said, measuring him coldly with my eyes, "David Talbot, Superior General of the Order of Psychic Detectives known as the Talamasca, had been catapulted into the body in which he now walks." I didn't know whether I paraphrased or made it up as I went along. "He'd been entrenched or chained inside it, made a prisoner by so many ropey veins, and then tricked into a vampire as a fiery unstanchable blood invaded his lucky anatomy, sealing his soul up in it as it transformed him into an immortal—a man of dark bronzed skin and dry, lustrous and thick black hair."
"I think you have it right," he said with indulgent politeness.
"A handsome gent," I went on, "the color of caramel, mov-
ing with such catlike ease and gilded glances that he makes me think of all things once delectable, and now a potpourri of scent: cinnamon, clove, mild peppers and other spices golden, brown or red, whose fragrances can spike my brain and plunge me into erotic yearnings that live now, more than ever, to play themselves out. His skin must smell like cashew nuts and thick almond creams. It does."
He laughed. "I get your point."
I had shocked myself. I was wretched for a moment. "I'm not sure I get myself," I said apologetically.
"I think it's plain," he said. "You want me to leave you alone."
I saw the preposterous contradictions in all this at once.
"Look," I whispered quickly. "I'm deranged," I whispered. "My senses cross, like so many threads to make a knot: taste, see, smell, feel. I'm rampant."
I wondered idly and viciously if I could attack him, take him, bring him down under my greater craft and cunning and taste his blood without his consent.
"I'm much too far along the road for that," he said, "and why would you chance such a thing?"
What self-possession. The older man in him did indeed command the sturdier younger flesh, the wise mortal with an iron authority over all things eternal and supernaturally powerful. What a blend of energies! Nice to drink his blood, to take him against his will. There is no such fun on Earth like the raping of an equal.
"I don't know," I said, ashamed. Rape is unmanly. "I don't know why I insult you. You know, I wanted to leave quickly. I mean I wanted to visit the attic, and then be out of here. I wanted to avoid this sort of infatuation. You are a wonder, and you think me a wonder, and it's rich."
I let my eyes pass over him. I'd been blind to him when we met last, that was most true.
He dressed to kill. With the cleverness of olden times, when men could preen like peacocks, he'd chosen golden sepia and umber colors for his clothes. He was smart and clean and fretted all over with careful bits of pure gold, in a wristband timepiece and buttons and a slender pin for his modern tie, that tailored spill of color men wear in this age, as if to let us grab them all the more easily by its noose. Stupid ornament. Even his shirt of polished cotton was tawny and full of something of the sun and the warmed earth. Even his shoes were brown, glossy as beetles' backs.
He came towards me.
"You know what I'm going to ask," he said. "Don't wrestle with these unarticulated thoughts, these new experiences, all this overwhelming understanding. Make a book out of it for me."
I couldn't have predicted that this would be his question. I was surprised, sweetly so, but nevertheless taken off guard.
"Make a book? I? Armand?"
I went towards him, turned sharply and fled up the steps to the attic, skirting the third floor and then entering the fourth.
The air was thick and warm here. It was a place daily baked by the sun. All was dry and sweet, the wood like incense and the floors splintery.
"Little girl, where are you?" I asked.
"Child, you mean," he said.
He had come up behind me, taking a bit of time for courtesy's sake.
He added, "She was never here."
"How do you know?"
"If she were a ghost, I could call her," he said.
I looked over my shoulder. "You have that power? Or is this just what you want to say to me right now? Before you venture further, let me warn you that we almost never have the power to see spirits."
"I'm altogether new," David said. "I'm unlike any others. I've come into the Dark World with different faculties. Dare I say, we, our species, vampires, have evolved?"
"The conventional word is stupid," I said. I moved further into the attic. I spied a small chamber with plaster and peeling roses, big floppy prettily drawn Victorian roses with pale fuzzy green leaves. I went into the chamber. Light came from a high window out of which a child could not have seen. Merciless, I thought.
"Who said that a child died here?" I said. All was clean beneath the soil of years. There was no presence. It seemed perfect and just, no ghost to comfort me. Why should a ghost come from some savory rest for my sake?
So I could cuddle up perhaps to the memory of her, her tender legend. How are children murdered in orphanages where only nuns attend? I never thought of women as so cruel. Dried up, without imagination perhaps, but not aggressive as we are, to kill.
I turned round and round. Wooden lockers lined one wall, and one locker stood open, and there the tumbled shoes were, little brown Oxfords, as they called them, with black strings, and now I beheld, where it had been behind me, the broken and frayed hole from which they'd ripped her clothes. All fallen there, moldy and wrinkled they lay, her clothes.
A stillness settled on me as if the dust of this place were a fine ice, coming down from the high peaks of haughty and monstrously selfish mountains to freeze all living things, this ice, to close up and stop forever all that breathed or felt or dreamed or lived.
He spoke in poetry:
"'Fear no more the heat of the sun,'" he whispered.
"'Nor the furious winter's rages. Fear no more . . .'"
I winced with pleasure. I knew the verses. I loved them.
I genuflected, as if before the Sacrament, and touched her clothes. "And she was little, no more than five, and she didn't die here at all. No one killed her. Nothing so special for her."
"How your words belie your thoughts," he said.
"Not so, I think of two things simultaneously. There's a distinction in being murdered. I was murdered. Oh, not by Marius, as you might think, but by others."
I knew I spoke soft and in an assuming way, because this wasn't meant for pure drama.
"I'm trimmed in memories as if in old furs. I lift my arm and the sleeve of memory covers it. I look around and see other times. But you know what frightens me the most—it is that this state, like so many others with me, will prove the verge of nothing but extend itself over centuries."
"What do you really fear? What did you want from Lestat when you came here?"
"David, I came to see him. I came to find out how it was with him, and why he lies there, unmoving. I came—."
I wasn't going to say any more.
His glossy nails made his hands look ornamental and special, caressive, comely and lovely with which to be touched. He picked up a small dress, torn, gray, spotted with bits of mean lace. Everything dressed in flesh can yield a dizzying beauty if you concentrate on it long enough, and his beauty leapt out without apology.
"Just clothes." Flowered cotton, a bit of velvet with a puffed sleeve no bigger than an apple for the century of bare arms by day and night. "No violence at all surrounding her," he said as if it were a pity. "Just a poor child, don't you think, and sad by nature as well as circumstance."
"And why were they walled up, tell me that! What sin did these little dresses commit?" I sighed. "Good God, David Talbot, why don't we let the little girl have her romance, her fame? You make me angry. You say you can see ghosts. You find them pleasant? You like to talk with them. I could tell you about a ghost—."
"When will you tell me? Look, don't you see the trick of a book?" He stood up, and dusted off his knee with his right hand. In his left was her gathered dress. Something about the whole configuration bothered me, a tall creature holding a little girl's crumpled dress.
"You know, when you think of it," I said, turning away, so I wouldn't see the dress in his hand, "there's no good reason under God for little girls and little boys. Think of it, the other tender issue of mammals. Among puppies or kittens or colts, does one find gender? It's never an issue. The half-grown fragile thing is sexless. There is no determination. There is nothing as splendid to look at as a little boy or girl. My head is so full of notions. I rather think I'll explode if I don't do something, and you say make a book for you. You think it's possible, you think . . ."
"What I think is that when you make a book, you tell the tale as you would like to know it!"
"I see no great wisdom in that."
"Well, then think, for most speech is a mere issue of our feelings, a mere explosion. Listen, note the way that you make these outbursts."
"I don't want to."
"But you do, but they are not the words you want to read. When you write, something different happens. You make a tale, no matter how fragmented or experimental or how disregarding of all conventional and helpful forms. Try this for me. No, no, I have a better idea."
"What?"
"Come down with me into my rooms. I live here now, I told you. Through my windows you can see the trees. I don't live like our friend Louis, wandering from dusty corner to dusty corner, and then back to his flat in the Rue Royale when he's convinced himself once more and for the thousandth time that no one can harm Lestat. I have warm rooms. I use candles for old light. Come down and let me write it, your story. Talk to me. Pace, and rant if you will, or rail, yes, rail, and let me write it, and even so, the very fact that I write, this in itself will make you make a form out of it. You'll begin to . . ."
"What?"
"To tell me what happened. How you died and how you lived."
"Expect no miracles, perplexing scholar. I didn't die in New York that morning. I almost died."
He had me faintly curious, but I could never do what he wanted. Nevertheless he was honest, amazingly so, as far as I could measure, and therefore sincere.
"Ah, so, I didn't mean literally. I meant that you should tell me what it was like to climb so high into the sun, and suffer so much, and, as you said, to discover in your pain all these memories, these connecting links. Tell me! Tell me."
"Not if you mean to make it coherent," I said crossly. I gauged his reaction. I wasn't bothering him. He wanted to talk more.
"Make it coherent? Armand, I'll simply write down what you say." He made his words simple yet curiously passionate.
"Promise?"
I flashed on him a playful look. Me! To do that.
He smiled. He wadded up the little dress and then dropped it carefully so it might fall in the middle of the pile of her old clothes.
"I'll not alter one syllable," he said. "Come be with me, and talk to me, and be my love." Again, he smiled.
Suddenly he came towards me, much in the aggressive manner in which I'd thought earlier to approach him. He slipped his hands under my hair, and felt of my face, and then he gathered up the hair and he put his face down into my curls, and he laughed. He kissed my cheek.
"Your hair's like something spun from amber, as if the amber would melt and could be drawn from candle flames in long fine airy threads and let to dry that way to make all these shining tresses. You're sweet, boylike and pretty as a girl. I wish I had one glimpse of you in antique velvet the way you were for him, for Marius. I wish I could see for one moment how it was when you dressed in stockings and wore a belted doublet sewn with rubies. Look at you, the frosty child. My love doesn't even touch you."
This wasn't true.
His lips were hot, and I could feel the fangs under them, feel the urgency suddenly in his fingers pressing against my scalp. It sent the shivers through me, and my body tensed and then shuddered, and it was sweet beyond prediction. I resented this lonely intimacy, resented it enough to transform it, or rid myself of it utterly. I'd rather die or be away, in the dark, simple and lonely with common tears.
From the look in his eyes, I thought he could love without giving anything. Not a connoisseur, just a blood drinker.
"You make me hungry," I whispered. "Not for you but for one who is doomed and yet alive. I want to hunt. Stop it. Why do you touch me? Why be so gentle?"
"Everyone wants you," he said.
"Oh, I know. Everyone would ravage a guilty cunning child! Everyone would have a laughing boy who knows his way around the block. Kids make better food than women, and girls are all too much like women, but young boys? They're not like men, are they?"
"Don't mock me. I meant I wanted only to touch you, to feel how soft you are, how eternally young."
"Oh, that's me, eternally young," I said. "You speak nonsense words for one so pretty yourself. I'm going out. I have to feed. And when I've finished with that, when I'm full and hot, then I'll come and I'll talk to you and tell you anything you want." I stepped back just a little from him, feeling the quivers through me as his fingers released my hair. I looked at the empty white window, peering too high for the trees.
"They could see nothing green here, and it's spring outside, southern spring. I can smell it through the walls. I want to look just for a moment on flowers. To kill, to drink blood and to have flowers."
"Not good enough. Want to make the book," he said. "Want to make it now and want you to come with me. I won't hang around forever."
"Oh, nonsense, of course you will. You think I'm a doll, don't you? You think I'm cute and made of poured wax, and you'll stay as long as I stay."
"You're a bit mean, Armand. You look like an angel, and talk like a common thug."
"Such arrogance! I thought you wanted me."
"Only on certain terms."
"You lie, David Talbot," I said.
I headed past him for the stairs. Cicadas sang in the night as they often do, to no clock, in New Orleans.
Through the nine-pane windows of the stairwell, I glimpsed the flowering trees of spring, a bit of vine curling on a porch top.
He followed. Down and down we went, walking like regular men, down to the first floor, and out the sparkling glass doors and into the broad lighted space of Napoleon Avenue with its damp, sweet park of green down the middle, a park thick with carefully planted flowers and old gnarled and humble, bending trees.
The whole picture moved with the subtle river winds, and wet mist swirled but would not fall into rain itself, and tiny green leaves drifted down like wilting ashes to the ground. Soft soft southern spring. Even the sky seemed pregnant with the season, lowering yet blushing with reflected light, giving birth to the mist from all its pores.
Strident perfume rose from the gardens right and left, from purple Four O'Clocks, as mortals call them here, a rampant flower like unto weed, but infinitely sweet, and the wild irises stabbing upwards like blades out of the black mud, throaty petals monstrously big, battering themselves on old walls and concrete steps, and then as always there were roses, roses of old women and roses of the young, roses too whole for the tropical night, roses coated with poison.
There had been streetcars here once on this center strip of grass. I knew it, that the tracks had run along this wide deep green space where I walked ahead of him, slumward, riverward, deathward, bloodward. He came after me. I could close my eyes as I walked, never losing a step, and see the streetcars.
"Come on, follow me," I said, describing what he did, not inviting him.
Blocks and blocks within seconds. He kept up. Very strong. The blood of an entire Royal Vampire court was inside him, no doubt of it. Count on Lestat to make the most lethal of monsters, that is, after his initial seductive blunders—Nicolas, Louis, Claudia—not a single one of the three able to take care of themselves alone, and two perished, and one lingering and perhaps the weakest vampire yet walking in the great world.
I looked back. His tight, polished brown face startled me. He looked lacquered all over, waxed, buffed, and once again I thought of spicy things, of the meat of candied nuts, and delicious aromas, of chocolates sweet with sugar and dark rich butterscotch, and it seemed a good thing suddenly to maybe grab ahold of him.
But this was no substitute for one rotten, cheap, ripe and odoriferous mortal. And guess what? I pointed. "Over there."
He looked as I directed him. He saw the sagging line of old buildings. Mortals everywhere lurked, slept, sat, dined, wandered, amid tiny narrow stairs, behind peeling walls and under cracked ceilings.
I had found one, most perfect in his wickedness, a great flurry of hateful embers, of malice and greed and contempt smoldering as he waited for me.
We'd come to Magazine Street and passed it, but we were not at the river, only almost, and this was a street I had no recollection of, or knowledge of, in my wanderings of this city—their city, Louis's and Lestat's—just a narrow street with these houses the color of driftwood under the moon and windows hung with makeshift coverings, and inside there was this one slouching, arrogant, vicious mortal fixed to a television set and guzzling malt from a brown bottle, ignoring the roaches and the pulsing heat that pressed in from the open window, this ugly, sweating, filthy and irresistible thing, this flesh and blood for me.
The house was so alive with vermin and tiny despicable things that it seemed no more than a shell surrounding him, crackling and friable and the same color in all its shadows as a forest. No antiseptic modern standards here. Even the furniture rotted in the trashy clutter and damp. Mildew covered the grinding white refrigerator.
Only the reeky personal bed and rags gave off the clue to reigning domesticity.
It was a proper nest in which to find this fowl, this ugly bird, thick rich pluckable, devourable sack of bones and blood and shabby plumage.
I pushed the door to one side, the human stench rising like a swirl of gnats, and thereby put it off its hinges, but not with much sound.
I walked on newspapers strewn on painted wood. Orange peels turned to brownish leather. Roaches running. He didn't even look up. His swollen drunken face was blue and eerie, black eyebrows thick and unkempt, and yet he looked quite possibly a bit angelic, due to the light from the tube.
He flicked the magic plastic twanger in his hand to make the channels change, and the light flared and flickered soundlessly, and then he let the song rise, a band playing, a travesty, people clapping.
Trashy noises, trashy images, like the trash all around him. All right, I want you. No one else does.
He looked up at me, a boy invader, David too far off for him to see, waiting.
I pushed the television set to the side. It teetered, then fell onto the floor, its parts breaking, like so many jars of energy were inside, and now splinters of glass.
A momentary fury overcame him, charging his face with sluggish recognition.
He rose up, arms out, and came at me.
Before I sank my