The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice

I have this edition of The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. It is leather-bound with golden page edges. Very cool. It includes the first three books in the series: Interview with a Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned.

It was my favorite present I received from Christmas last year. I love vampires, books, New Orleans and the 2 movies these books were based on – so naturally, I’d love this series too, right? RIGHT? Wrong! Well, sorta.

I’ll start with Interview with a Vampire. I loved the movie. I’ve seen it a few times and love Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in it. Kirsten Dunst even too as Claudia. The book itself was really not as interesting and quite dragged out. I read it though and figured it would get better as the series went on. I mean, I didn’t hate it. I was just left with an “eh” feel.

I then started reading The Vampire Lestat. Through this book, you learn much more about Lestat obviously and the whole vampire culture and how things go back to “those who must be kept” – the king and the queen. Interesting but so did not captivate me. It took me forever to get through this book. It was so drawn out that I can see why they didn’t make a movie about this one exactly.

I would have stopped reading the series all together if it weren’t for the fact that Queen of the Damned was included in the book I have. I have to say that I liked Queen of the Damned much more than The Vampire Lestat. It was written in different perspectives of the different vampires in the series and more myth and legend comes into play in this one too. Akasha – the "Queen of the Damned" is even awoken by Lestat’s music and him declaring he is a vampire rocker in the media. This isn’t much of a spoiler, especially if you saw the movie. Speaking of the movie, I really do like the movie – even if it doesn't go by the book very much at all.

As I finished reading Queen of the Damned, I was left with some wonder of what happened next in the series. I really wanted there to be a love story of some extent between Jesse and Mael. So, I looked up the next books in the series on Amazon and read the synopsis. I didn’t see anything in there at all about them. Then I looked it up on Wiki (because you can find everything on Wiki, right?) – and nothing is mentioned about them after Queen of the Damned. WHAT?

Rice finally made me want to read something next in the series and it wasn’t ever even written about. That makes me sad. Even if I didn’t want to read the whole series, I wanted to at least know what happened between these two. Ugh!

Normally I’d give this a great review, I mean vampires and New Orleans (two of my favorite topics) – but this I cannot recommend. Perhaps if you hated any new vampire books/series like Twilight, True Blood or the Southern Vampire Series (books based on True Blood) or The Vampire Diaries you may end up liking this series. I just found it sadly to be bland and lacking any type of romance at all.

My overall rating: Two fangs down.