Vampires

Oh Lestat, what have you done now? At the end of The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice's beloved Brat Prince has incurred the wrath of vampires across the globe and somehow managed to awaken the vampire Akasha from a slumber of a few thousand years. And such is her fascination with the fanged Frenchman that she grants herself a quickie divorce from her 6,000 year old husband, Enkil. By bleeding him dry (in a vampiric sense - lawyers would have only slowed things down).

Anyhow, having read quite a number of Anne Rice's vampire chronicles, I'm inclined to say that The Queen Of The Damned is one of the best. For a start, it's not totally devoted to Lestat. We finally get a chance to look around at other vampires and see the colour and variation of their characters.

It's a joy, for instance, to see Marius spurned by the ancient vampire he's protected for a couple of thousand years. To see Marius's assumptions shattered and the utter disdain of Akasha for him. And his resulting bitterness is something you never expect to see from one of the most self-assured immortals in Rice's savage garden.