New Releases by Anne Rice

The 50th anniversary edition of the spellbinding classic that started it all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author. This dazzling special edition features a jacket with foil and embossing, sprayed edges, designed endpapers, a new foreword from Leigh Bardugo, an afterword by Christopher Rice, and never-before-seen bonus pages from the original manuscript. Here are the confessions of a vampire: a hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual story of Louis de Pointe du Lac's first two hundred years as one of the living dead. We begin on the night when Louis, disaffected and reluctant heir to a Louisiana plantation, is turned into a vampire by Lestat. Radiant, petulant, and powerful, Lestat becomes Louis’ companion and urges him to embrace the hungers and feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures. As Louis struggles to retain the last residue of human feeling within him, he discovers must commit the ultimate act: to break away from his creator and discover the new world to which he belongs—whatever the cost. This is a story of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, of gaining humanity and losing it, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.

An annotated cosmology of Anne Rice's Vampiredom from A(kasha) to Z(enobia)—all fifteen books of the Vampire Chronicles detailed, by a longtime Anne Rice reader and scholar; the who, what, where, why, (and often) how of her beloved characters, mortal and 'im', brought together in a book for the first time. Illustrated by Mark Edward Geyer. An Alphabettery of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles gathers together, from all fifteen of the books in the series, the facts, details, story lines, genealogies of her characters, vampiric subjects, geographical influences, and cultural and individual histories, all of which Rice painstakingly researched and invented during her 40-year career--to date--through which she has enchanted and transported us. Here are concise, detailed biographies of every character, no matter how central or minor to the cosmology. Revealed are the intricacies and interconnectedness of characters and subjects throughout. We see how Akasha (Queen of Egypt and the first vampire) is connected to Mekare (the inheritor of the title of the Queen of the Damned), etc., and how these characters connect back to the darkest rebel outlaw of them all, Lestat de Lioncourt ... And we see, as well, the ways in which Rice's vampires have evolved from warring civilizations to isolated covens to a unified race of blood drinkers led by their hero-wanderer and sole monarch, Prince Lestat. For devoted and first-time Anne Rice readers alike, An Alphabettery of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles will be the holy grail of lore and revelation for those who have been, and continue to be, mesmerized by the worlds within worlds of these beloved tales of the undead.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Vintage Anne Rice—a lushly written, gothic … metaphysical tale. This time, with werewolves.” —The Wall Street Journal When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it’s at the behest of the home’s enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions. Why has he been given the wolf gift? What is its true nature—good or evil? And are there others out there like him?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The first book in the divinely thrilling Songs of the Seraphim series about an assassin with the choice to turn from darkness to light—from the acclaimed author of Interview with the Vampire It’s the present day. Toby O’Dare—aka Lucky the Fox—is a contract killer on assignment once again. He’s a soulless soul, a dead man walking. His nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions is disrupted when a mysterious stranger, a seraph, offers him a chance to save rather than destroy lives. O’Dare, who long ago dreamt of being a priest, seizes his chance. Now he is carried back through the ages to thirteenth-century England, to dark realms where children suddenly die or disappear, and accusations of ritual murder have been made against Jews. Here O’Dare begins his perilous quest for salvation, a journey of danger and flight, loyalty and betrayal, selflessness and love.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of The Vampire Chronicles, two seductive and mesmerizing novels linked by two distinct creatures of the night In Pandora, fledgling vampire David Talbot chronicles the history of Pandora, a two-thousand-year-old vampire. In Vittorio, the Vampire, set in fifteenth-century Renaissance Florence, Vittorio finds his world shattered when his entire family is destroyed in an act of unholy violence and embarks on a desperate quest for revenge.

Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches and the amazing worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a new series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead. The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded café, where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life. Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together. Look for Anne Rice’s new book, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, coming November 29, 2016.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the second installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series! “[Anne] Rice’s descriptive writing is so opulent it almost begs to be read by candlelight.”—The Washington Post Book World In seventeenth-century Scotland, the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjured up the spirit she named Lasher—a creation that spelled her own destruction and torments each of her descendants. Now, the beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, must flee from this darkly brutal yet irresistible demon. The magic of the Mayfairs continues: THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS

In a new and major novel, the creator of fantastic universes o vampires and witches takes us now into the world of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the destruction of Solomon's Temple, to tell the story of Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is ghost, genii, demon, angel--pure spirit made visible. He pours his heart out to us as he journeys from an ancient Babylon of royal plottings and religious upheavals to Europe of the Black Death and on to the modern world. There he finds himself, amidst the towers of Manhattan, in confrontation with his own human origins and the dark forces that have sought to condemn him to a life of evil and destruction.

“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 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 “Fast-paced . . . . mesmerizing . . . silkenly sensuous . . . No one writing today matches her deftness with the [sensual].”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Hypnotic . . . masterful.”—Cosmopolitan

Having completed the two cycles of legend to which she has devoted her career so far, Anne Rice gives us now her most thoughtful and powerful book, a novel about the childhood of Christ the Lord based on the gospels and on the most respected New Testament scholarship. The book’s power derives from the passion its author brings to the writing, and the way in which she summons up the voice, the presence, the words of the young Jesus who tells the story.

An intimate memoir of Anne Rice’s Catholic girlhood, her unmaking as a devout believer, and her return to the Church – what she calls a decision of the heart. Moving from her New Orleans childhood in the 1940s and ‘50s, with all its religious devotions, through how she slowly lost her belief in God, Called Out of Darkness also recounts Anne’s years in radical Berkeley, where she wrote Interview with the Vampire (a lament for her lost faith) and where she came to admire the principles of secular humanists. She writes about loss and alienation (her mother’s drinking, the deaths of her young daughter and later, her husband); about the birth of her son, Christopher; and about how, after 38 years as an atheist, she once again came to believe in Christ. Anne Rice makes a spiritual confession that is a celebration: a brilliant, subtle exploration of the journey through life that allows one to answer the call out of darkness.

Perennial bestseller Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative—her Vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches—to give us a world of classic deep-south luxury and ancestral secrets. Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelgänger, “Goblin,” a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can’t escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelgänger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself. As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn’s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds. A story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny, Blackwood Farm is Anne Rice at her mesmerizing best.

In the grand manner of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek Revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold. Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures--a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power. In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue. Against a backdrop of the wonders--both sacred and profane--and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold. Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures--a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power. In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue. Against a backdrop of the wonders--both sacred and profane--and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

"STARTLING . . . FIENDISH . . . MEMNOCH'S TALE IS COMPELLING." --New York Daily News "Like Interview with the Vampire, Memnoch has a half-maddened, fever-pitch intensity. . . . Narrated by Rice's most cherished character, the vampire Lestat, Memnoch tells a tale as old as Scripture's legends and as modern as today's religious strife." --Rolling Stone "SENSUAL . . . BOLD, FAST-PACED." --USA Today "Rice has penned an ambitious close to this long-running series. . . . Fans will no doubt devour this." --The Washington Post Book World "MEMNOCH THE DEVIL OFFERS PASSAGES OF POETIC BRILLIANCE." --Playboy "[MEMNOCH] is one of Rice's most intriguing and sympathetic characters to date. . . . Rice ups the ante, taking Lestat where few writers have ventured: into heaven and hell itself. She carries it off in top form." --The Seattle Times

One of the world's best known and biggest bestselling authors of contemporary fiction, Rice has herself been the subject of countless interviews, profiles, and a full-length biography. Yet who Anne Rice is, and the beliefs, fascinations, desires, fears, and passions that inspire her work, remain endlessly fascinating topics.

After 6,000 years of horrifying stillness, Akash, mother of all vampires and Queen of the Damned, has risen from her sleep to let loose the powers of the night. But her monstrous plan for ruling the worlds of the living and the undead must be stopped before she destroys mankind, and it falls to the evil vampire Lestat to fight her all-encompassing evil - for it is he who challenged her power by waking her from sleep.

In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

Lestat recounts the story of how he became a vampire in eighteenth-century France

Analyse : Roman fantastique.

In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern histroy. Though descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who enslaved them. Called the Free People of Color, this dazzling historical novel chronicles the lives of four of them--men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.

Returning to the hypnotic world she so brilliantly created in Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her power to enthrall. “Brilliant ... its undead characters are utterly alive.”—The New York Times Book Review With the same richness of drama, atmosphere and incident, she tells the fantastic story of the vampire Lestat, whom we first perceived as the seductive devil-vampire of Interview with the Vampire and whom we now follow through the ages as he searches for the origin and meaning of his own dark immortality. And who, more and more, engages our sympathy until he stands revealed as a questing romantic, a vampire-hero with his own strange and passionate courage and morality. As the novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five years' sleep, and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of millions. And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the riddle of his own existence. As he speaks we are plunged back into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling troupe of actors. We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first apprentice at a boulevard theater, then its most celebrated actor, idolized, adored by many and--night after night--watched by one . . . until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy, he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally joined to the unholy brotherhood. We follow Lestat as he searches for others like him--in churches and brothels, in gambling houses, huts and palaces--sometimes joined by the vampire-angel Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty are equally transcendent. We follow Lestat as he travels from the snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins, sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing always that the central truth eludes him. But all the while, throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has made enemies among his brethren--vampires who are in terror of his questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to rule. And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is at last revealed. Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning climax, Lestat's vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic freeways of the twentieth century.