Books I Enjoy

In a gripping feat of storytelling, Anne Rice continues the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles that began with the now-classic Interview with the Vampire. For centuries, Lestat—vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals—has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Now he is alone. And in his overwhelming need to destroy his doubts and his loneliness, Lestat embarks on the most dangerous enterprise he has undertaken in all the years of his haunted existence. Praise for The Tale of the Body Thief  “Tinged with mystery, full of drama . . . The story is involving, the twists surprising.”—People   “Rice is our modern messenger of the occult, whose nicely updated dark-side passion plays twist and turn in true Gothic form.”—San Francisco Chronicle  “Fast-paced . . . . mesmerizing . . . silkenly sensuous . . . No one writing today matches her deftness with the erotic.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  “Hypnotic . . . masterful.”—CosmopolitanFrom the Paperback edition.

Jack Torrance's new job at the Overlook Hotel is the perfect chance for a fresh start. As the off-season caretaker at the atmospheric old hotel, he'll have plenty of time to spend reconnecting with his family and working on his writing. But as the harsh winter weather sets in, the idyllic location feels ever more remote...and more sinister. And the only one to notice the strange and terrible forces gathering around the Overlook is Danny Torrance, a uniquely gifted five-year-old.

Disappointing, truly. First, almost nothing actually happens within the present timeline in which the book is written. It's a string of stories told over a glass of rum. As a result, it reads like a "best-of clips" episode of a sit com (and is about as interesting).You get to hear all about Oncle Vervain, Cold Sandra, Great Nannane, and Oncle Julien. This could have been interesting, but because Rice never managed to make me care about any of these characters before plunging into these droning stories, it came across like an old drunk woman you've met at the bus stop telling you her life story for no reason known to you.The premise of this book held so much potential, but Anne Rice has managed to realize absolutely none of it. The most powerful witch known to the Talamasca being made into a vampire by the most powerful vampire in the realm? Sounds brilliant, right? Well, none of the things that spring to mind with that description come to fruition in Merrick. It's emphasized repeatedly and in many ways how powerful a witch Merrick is; but she never really does anything much more than reading minds (a trick which even the weakest vampires could achieve with the Mind Gift).That aside, it's heralded as the "blending of the stories of the mayfairs and the vampires," but neither story is really present in this book. Have you noticed that some lists show Merrick in the Vampire Chronicles, and some lists do not? That's because this novel is of absolutely no consequence to the saga. In fact, while Merrick is technically related to the Mayfairs you've come to know before this book, she makes it a point not to involve herself with them, so hers is an entirely different story, really.And once again, Rice falls into purple prose (surprised?). You get countless descriptions of her imbibing of rum, of the texture of the fabric on her bodice, of her breasts and hair; and suddenly you realize you must backtrack to remember what's going on in the story.That said, I'd advise you to skip this book and move on to Blood and Gold (which is well worth the read). As I've said, none of the proceedings of this book are of any consequence, so skipping this book will not diminish your understanding of future installments.

Meet Dexter Morgan, a polite wolf in sheep's clothing. He's handsome and charming, but something in his past has made him abide by a different set of rules. He's a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likeable: he only kills bad people. And his job as a blood splatter expert for the Miami police department puts him in the perfect position to identify his victims. But when a series of brutal murders bearing a striking similarity to his own style start turning up, Dexter is caught between being flattered and being frightened—of himself or some other fiend.

At a club in Missing Mile, N.C., the children of the night gather, dressed in black, looking for acceptance. Among them are Ghost, who sees what others do not. Ann, longing for love, and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, newly awakened to an ancient, deathless truth about his father, and himself.Others are coming to Missing Mile tonight. Three beautiful, hip vagabonds - Molochai, Twig, and the seductive Zillah (whose eyes are as green as limes) are on their own lost journey; slaking their ancient thirst for blood, looking for supple young flesh.They find it in Nothing and Ann, leading them on a mad, illicit road trip south to New Orleans. Over miles of dark highway, Ghost pursues, his powers guiding him on a journey to reach his destiny, to save Ann from her new companions, to save Nothing from himself...

Why?Many years from now, historians will look back on this story and wonder why it was so important. And believe me, my friends, important it was. Today, most thrillers and police procedurals gets measured against it.For this review, I will refer to TSOTL as the story, because I'm going to talk about the book, movie, facts, fiction and some of my own opinions.TSOTL was the second Dr. Hannibal Lector story. It was also the second movie adaptation - wait just a damn moment, you might be saying to me, Red Dragon was the first book but it was made after the TSOTL movie was so successful...Correct.However, there was an attempt at a screen adaptation of Red Dragon a few years before TSOTL, called MANHUNTER. It was directed by Michael Mann. To the best of my knowledge, it was a flop at the box office.There are a few things TSOTL had going for it that counted in its favor. By all means, Thomas Harris is a brilliant writer - if you've read any of the books you will know this. But most movie freaks and geeks will agree with me that the story is probably one of the best adaptations from book to screen ever.Then you look at the cast - Jody Foster managed to play a vulnerable yet strong female (IMPORTANT) lead. You know she is intelligent, yet she knows that she has no chance against the superior intellect of Dr. Hannibal Lector. In comes Anthony Hopkins, whose portrayal of the psychopathic genius is so convincing, it catapults him to one of the biggest super villains of all time, yet he is so charming that the audience can't help but like him.And, of course, Buffalo Bill is played by Ted Levine, who is utterly convincing, even if you've seen him as the cop in MONK.With a strong cast and story, this movie became an unlikely contender at the Academy Awards. And they won a few!Right, lets take a step back, to the research phase of this story.Thomas Harris, in the early 80's, were doing research and was fortunate enough to get involved with criminal profiling, which at that time had been an unproven and highly speculative science. It was during the time when they were on the trail of one Ted Bundy. If you know a bit about this famous serial killer, you will probably know that he used to fake injuries by wearing a cast and asking victims for their help - Do you remember how Buffalo Bill got that girl in the back of the van? And while Bundy was incarcerated on death row, he was willing to help the police do a profile on another serial killer of the time, The Green River Killer. I believe Bundy told them not to remove a body when they discover it, because the killer will go back to his treasure - something that was later confirmed to have happened. Remember that agent Sterling asked Dr. Lector for his help? And then there was the killer Ed Gein, many decades before, who robbed graves and ultimately killed people to make himself a female skin, which was apparently hard to sow without tearing. Need I explain this one? The fact of the matter is, while some things may have seemed preposterous to us in the early eighties, like they could only happen in the movies, there were some truly messed up people out there who were doing some truly messed up things - wow, it's been a while since I've kept a sentence PG like that...I will accept your applause humbly.Also, there was and, unfortunately, still are some stereo types about women in the FBI. Harris took the opportunity to make a statement, maybe very subtly, but still very important, about power vs. emotion. At no time does this story feel like a Hollywood blockbuster, where the star is cocky and always has a way out of a sticky situation, where it's all guns and fire and explosions, etc. No, this story was meant to cut close to home, to show the possibilities, for we are all vulnerable in this world. Agent Clarice is scared, she fears for her life, she doesn't know if she will survive, but she fights the big, bad (Goliath) killer. And she wins.This story is also important from a psychological point of view. Whatever your feelings about profiling may be, they have discovered so much and found impossible connections through their research, and we will never know how many lives it has saved. It's a kind of Paying-it-forward thing: By doing what they do, they prevent things that may have been inevitable in a different world.I once saw something (I can't remember exactly where) about some research they were doing on inmates. They took brain scans of a number of them, and noted that those who were certified as psychopathic, had an underdeveloped area in a certain part of their brains. If I can remember correctly, it had something to do with the mother producing too much serotonin during pregnancy, or some such scientific thing.How is this helpful, you may ask?Well, this is my personal opinion, so if it offends you, stop reading:Casey Anthony...Is she a psychopath who got away with murder?Yes, when I look at the facts of the case, and the things her attorney's did to get her free, I'm sickened to think the jurors couldn't believe a mother would do that to her child. Nobody LIKES to believe it, but I wish I could have seen a brain scan of her compared to those other psychopaths. I wish there was a psychologist who could have explained it to them.But enough about that.This book is, was and always will be important, because it brought certain realities home to the world we find ourselves in.If you haven't read it - but managed to get through this long review - what's the matter with you?But I am not trying to convince anybody of my point of view, so feel free to disagree.

Anne Rice brings to life the exquisite and otherworldly society of the eighteenth-century castrati, the delicate and alluring male sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices brought them the adulation of the royal courts and grand opera houses of Europe, men who lived as idols, concealing their pain as they were adored as angels, yet shunned as half-men.As we are drawn into their dark and luminous story, as the crowds of Venetians, Neopolitans, and Romans, noblemen and peasants, musicians, prelates, princes, saints, and intriguers swirl around them, Anne Rice brings us into the sweep of eighteenth-century Italian life, into the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius.

From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches—a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking... and The Witching Hour begins.It begins in our time with a rescue at sea.  Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.  He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV.  An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher... a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien—the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers—provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing.  And always—through peril and escape, tension and release—there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death.  With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.

When it first appeared, one volume per month, Stephen King's THE GREEN MILE was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller lists—simultaneously—and delighted millions of fans the world over.Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with "Old Sparky," Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he's never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefes... and yours.

Such wonderful children. Such a beautiful mother. Such a lovely house. Such endless terror!It wasn't that she didn't love her children. She did. But there was a fortune at stake—a fortune that would assure their later happiness if she could keep the children a secret from her dying father.So she and her mother hid her darlings away in an unused attic.Just for a little while.But the brutal days swelled into agonizing years. Now Cathy, Chris, and the twins wait in their cramped and helpless world, stirred by adult dreams, adult desires, served a meager sustenance by an angry, superstitious grandmother who knows that the Devil works in dark and devious ways. Sometimes he sends children to do his work—children who—one by one—must be destroyed....'Way upstairs there are four secrets hidden. Blond, beautiful, innocent struggling to stay alive....

Years after his escape, posing as scholarly Dr. Fell, curator of a grand family's palazzo, Hannibal lives the good life in Florence, playing lovely tunes by serial killer/composer Henry VIII and killing hardly anyone himself. Clarice is unluckier: in the novel's action-film-like opening scene, she survives an FBI shootout gone wrong, and her nemesis, Paul Krendler, makes her the fall guy. Clarice is suspended, so, unfortunately, the first cop who stumbles on Hannibal is an Italian named Pazzi, who takes after his ancestors, greedy betrayers depicted in Dante's Inferno. Pazzi is on the take from a character as scary as Hannibal: Mason Verger. When Verger was a young man busted for raping children, his vast wealth saved him from jail. All he needed was psychotherapy--with Dr. Lecter. Thanks to the treatment, Verger is now on a respirator, paralyzed except for one crablike hand, watching his enormous, brutal moray eel swim figure eights and devour fish. His obsession is to feed Lecter to some other brutal pets.

In the fifth Vampire Chronicle, Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic mortal daughter of a drug lord. Dora has moved Lestat like no other mortal ever has, and he cannot get her out of his visions. At the same time, he is increasingly aware that the Devil knows who he is and wants something from him. While torn betwen his vampire world and his passion for Dora, Lestat is sucked in by Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil himself. Memnoch presents Lestat with unimagined opportunities: to witness creation, to visit purgatory, to be treated like a prophet. Lestat faces a choice between the Devil or God. Whom does he believe in? Who does he serve? What are the element of religious belief? Lestat finds himself caught in a whirlpool of the ultimate choice

Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to "My dear and unfortunate successor". Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of – a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history.

Imajica is an epic beyond compare: vast in conception, obsessively detailed in execution, and apocalyptic in its resolution. At its heart lies the sensualist and master art forger, Gentle, whose life unravels when he encounters Judith Odell, whose power to influence the destinies of men is vaster than she knows, and Pie 'oh' pah, an alien assassin who comes from a hidden dimension.That dimension is one of five in the great system called Imajica. They are worlds that are utterly unlike our own, but are ruled, peopled, and haunted by species whose lives are intricately connected with ours. As Gentle, Judith, and Pie 'oh' pah travel the Imajica, they uncover a trail of crimes and intimate betrayals, leading them to a revelation so startling that it changes reality forever.

Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found hereIn 1976, a uniquely seductive world of vampires was unveiled in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire . . . in 1985, a wild and voluptous voice spoke to us, telling the story of The Vampire Lestat.  In The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice continues her extraordinary "Vampire Chronicles" in a feat of mesmeric storytelling, a chillingly hypnotic entertainment in which the oldest and most powerful forces of the night are unleashed on an unsuspecting world.Three brilliantly colored narrative threads intertwine as the story unfolds:- The rock star known as Vampire Lestat, worshipped by millions of spellbound fans, prepares for a concert in San Francisco.  Among the audience--pilgrims in a blind swoon of adoration--are hundreds of vampires, creatures who see Lestat as a "greedy fiend risking the secret prosperity of all his kind just to be loved and seen by mortals," fiends themselves who hate Lestat's power and who are determined to destroy him . . . - The sleep of certain men and women--vampires and mortals scattered around the world--is haunted by a vivid, mysterious dream: of twins with fiery red hair and piercing green eyes who suffer an unspeakable tragedy.  It is a dream that slowly, tauntingly reveals its meaning to the dreamers as they make their way toward each other--some to be destroyed on the journey, some to face an even more terrifying fate at journey's end . . . - Akasha--Queen of the Damned, mother of all vampires, rises after a 6,000 year sleep and puts into motion a heinous plan to "save" mankind from itself and make "all myths of the world real" by elevating herself and her chosen son/lover to the level of the gods: "I am the fulfillment and I shall from this moment be the cause" . . . These narrative threads wind sinuously across a vast, richly detailed tapestry of the violent, sensual world of vampirism, taking us back 6,000 years to its beginnings.  As the stories of the "first brood" of blood drinkers are revealed, we are swept across the ages, from Egypt to South America to the Himalayas to all the shrouded corners of the globe where vampires have left their mark. Vampires are created--mortals succumbing to the sensation of "being enptied, of being devoured, of being nothing." Vampires are destroyed.  Dark rituals are performed--the rituals of ancient creatures prowling the modern world.  And, finally, we are brought to a moment in the twentieth century when, in an astonishing climax, the fate of the living dead--and perhaps of the living, all the living--will be decided.From the Hardcover edition.

In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand - eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. Armand, who first appeared in all his dark glory more than twenty years ago in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire, the first of The Vampire Chronicles, the novel that established its author worldwide as a magnificent storyteller and creator of magical realms.Now, we go with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood - a ruined city under Mongol dominion - and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood. As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.

You can find an alternative cover edition for this ISBN here and here.A rich selection of background and source materials is provided in three areas: Contexts includes probable inspirations for Dracula in the earlier works of James Malcolm Rymer and Emily Gerard. Also included are a discussion of Stoker's working notes for the novel and "Dracula's Guest," the original opening chapter to Dracula. Reviews and Reactions reprints five early reviews of the novel. "Dramatic and Film Variations" focuses on theater and film adaptations of Dracula, two indications of the novel's unwavering appeal. David J. Skal, Gregory A. Waller, and Nina Auerbach offer their varied perspectives. Checklists of both dramatic and film adaptations are included.Criticism collects seven theoretical interpretations of Dracula by Phyllis A. Roth, Carol A. Senf, Franco Moretti, Christopher Craft, Bram Dijkstra, Stephen D. Arata, and Talia Schaffer.A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.

Lestat. The vampire hero of Anne Rice's enthralling new novel is a creature of the darkest and richest imagination. Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now a rock star in the demonic, shimmering 1980s, he rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his eternal, terrifying existence. His is a mesmerizing story --- passionate, complex, and thrilling.