Bibliography VI

“Blood Canticle”—Anne Rice

I love Lestat. I love Anne Rice. I’m not too crazy about the Mayfair witches, especially Rowan and Mona, so having them show up in this volume of The Vampire Chronicles was going to be a challenge, but I was willing to give it a whirl.

Parts of it were dazzling. She will never lose her ability to mesmerize with written imagery. I think I even got the point of the story—Lestat longs to be a saint; he wants to do good though he believes he is eternally damned, so he sets out to solve a mystery for a pair of mortal witches—but the end result was more crazy quilt than polished brocade.

It helps to like the characters, and I don’t like the two Mayfairs who showed up here. I don’t get why Lestat insists on making a vampire of everyone he loves when a) he always ends up alone and b) their mortality is what attracts him in the first place. He does it over and over, and it always backfires on him. He’s young in vampire years, but really? I’m way younger than he is and I’ve figured it out. But why he felt so passionately for one mortal in this story absolutely escapes me, as I saw nothing remotely lovable about her and he didn’t explain it. He was simply, suddenly, obsessed and in love. That relationship didn’t fit within the story, either; it was more of a distraction, an annoying buzz that popped up during a lull in the action, and culminating in a final chapter that meant pretty well nothing so far as I could tell.

Then there’s the haunting—he’s plagued by the Mayfair patriarch’s ghost, who resents Lestat stealing the favoured daughter from the light, but again, that relationship didn’t work for me. It made too little sense. I couldn’t figure out how he appeased the spirit enough to make him go away, so it either wasn’t explained very well or I didn’t care enough to carry it with me when I wasn’t actually reading.

I like a story that stays with me between bouts.

It’s painful to admit. I didn’t get it, so I didn’t feel it, and that made me an indifferent reader. Whether a book is good or bad is completely subjective, that’s why I place little value on critical reviews. I will rave about a book that inspires me, however, and adhere—or try—to the adage about saying nothing if you can’t say something positive. I’ll wear the fact that I missed the author’s vision in this instance, but the greater angst lies in my having once understood and adored her work. Honestly, her earlier novels are magical. Her later ones harbour diamonds in the prose, but the stories are less coherent, more chaotic and peopled with characters in relationships that I find hard to swallow. Blood Canticle, unfortunately, almost choked me.