Anne Rice's Blood Canticle or Dude, where's my personality?

[lone_she_wolf]

Hello

Comments

[porticia]

Oh god, Dixie Chicks? Refers to himself as goth???

I said something in an earlier post on Anne Rice, I'm trying to make it through the entire series but it's hard. I'm on Merrick and honestly, since I barely finished Blood and Gold, and The Vampire Armand, it's doubtful I'll find the will to continue with the chronicles.

I've heard that the last books she's published with Lestat are completely different from the beginning of the series....but my god I had no idea how bad it would be.

I think the only later book that she published that I actually enjoyed was Pandora. I think that was because other than Marius and the mention of the other vampires at the beginning and end of the book, it was pretty much absent of the other characters that I came to be annoyed with after Queen of the Damned.

[lone_she_wolf]

Yes, it's true. The Dixie Chicks reference comes at the end of Blood Canticle. I know some Anne Rice fans feel they have to love everything she has ever doen but I don't. I LOVE The Vampire Lestat. I loathe Blood Canticle. There's even a scene where Lestat blows up a helicopter with his mind. I know Anne Rice is trying to appeal to younger readers but come on! Blowing up a helicopter with his mind? And she tries to revise her own vampire language. She's dumbed it down. Psychokinesis has become 'fire gift.' Telepathy has become 'mind gift.' ect... She even starts to refer to her vampires as 'blood hunters' and claims younger vampires like to call themselves 'blood hunters' as opposed to vampires. Sorry, Anne. Not happening. It sounds like a cheesy name for a head hunting tribe in an old movie.

[porticia]

One of the inconsistencies that bothered me the most, is after Queen of the Damned, weren't all vampires except those that met with Akasha, killed, except for Thorne from Blood and Gold? She led me to believe that there was sort of a new beginning for vampires, and even said how they all agreed to make no new ones without the approval of others.

Then, in Merrick and whatnot, there's all of a sudden new vampires, wtf? Maybe she explained it somewhere, or maybe she just pulled it out of her butt. Or maybe we are supposed to assume that they all didn't adhere to the rules of not making new ones and filled the world with new vampires in the time span between Queen of the Damned and the later books? Ok, sorry for the ramble....

I think other than her inconsistencies, the big reason I cannot take the later books seriously, is because whereas the first books all take place in the past, now she is taking her creatures that she so aptly wrote for ancient times and is trying to make them "modern" and it just does not mesh.

[lone_she_wolf]

She did hint that others might have survived Akasha's slaughter because they were too strong (like Khayman) or protected by strong vampires (Like Eric being protected by Maharet) either that or she hadn't gotten around to killing them yet. She wasn't quite done when she abducted Lestat.

[girlingoldboots]

I've said it before but it bears repeating: Anne Rice's only good book was "Interview with a Vampire". She put everything she had into it and should have at best been a one book author.

What she needs is to learn continuity. And get a decent editor and a spell/grammar check.

[lone_she_wolf]

I don't mind The Vampire Lestat novel. The contradictions in that one can easily be explained as a he said / she said. Two different perspectives and one character with an ego (Lestat) would of course deny that Louis saw him in the weakened condition toward the end of Interview with the vampire but the fact is it had to have happened. Lestat admitted that he had been there and in that state. So how else could Louis have known about it unless he had been there? So that contradiction fits the character as in the character, himself, denying it happened out of egotism.

However the later book contradictions (Lestat's left eye being ripped out and then in the next two books she says it's the right) are the result of Anne Rice's own ego. She doesn't use an editor anymore. I'm serious. She honestly thinks she doesn't need one now.

[girlingoldboots]

Thought that "no editing' was a rumour? No wonder everything after a certain point reads like a first draft. It IS!

I also have a problem with her "Sleeping Beauty" books. First chapter started out good, but there's a difference between 'submissive' and 'dishrag with no spine'

[lone_she_wolf]

I could never get into those.

[goodconceited]

Thaaank you for this. I've been waffling on whether or not to get back into Anne Rice and try her latest works, but, uh... I think I'm good now!

[lone_she_wolf]

Don't let me stop you from reading a book. I just warn that I didn't like it at all. Judge for yourself.

[dis_inclined]

I agree. Blood Canticle is one of the worst books I've read. And I was an avid fan until about the time of Blackwood Farm. Merrick was tolerable. I even read and enjoyed Memnoch the Devil and The Vampire Armand.
I am of the opinion that he should have been left comatose on the church floor (Lestat, that is). He was a great character, in the beginning, and it went so downhill. Why, Anne Rice? Why make him virtually unrecognisable? Why make a vampire turn to religion? Why make him fall in love with your other favourite character, Rowan Mayfair (who, by the way, I never liked). It was just a miserable excuse for a book.

[lone_she_wolf]

I never liked Rowan Mayfair either. She's a cold, unfaithful, ssimple minded (Though she's supposed to be a brain surgeon), unsympathetic mad scientist. She killed her own child just for being different when that child had just saved her life. That's more like an X-men villain than a hero. She doesn't feel Femininely empowering to me as Anne Rice intended for her to be. And I can't understand Lestat's attraction to her.

[lone_she_wolf]

Someone I know wrote a heckling of the first chapter of Blood Canticle. You can find it here.

http://www.vampires.sarawebsite.com/parodies/bloodc.html

The part in white is her mockery. The rest is REAL text from Blood Canticle's first chapter.