queen of the damned - oh god, GTTFP already!

[qthewetsprocket]

help me, f'list! i'm about 2/3 - 3/4 of the way through, and this thing is finally starting to annoy me...the bit at the beginning with the domestic stuff between daniel and armand, and the massacre at the rock concert, and the bit with laurent and baby jenks; that was all cool

Comments

[britgeekgrrl]

i think i am going to hurl the goddamn book across the room if i hear one more freaking word about the precious martyred 'twins'.

That drove me CRAZY the first two times I tried to read the book.

Finally, a friend told me to just start reading about 200 pages in as, yes, the first 199 pages are "These red-headed twins are important!" and not much else. I finally made it all the way through the book, but I can't say it was worth the effort. IMHO, the series should have ended after Vampire Lestat.

[qthewetsprocket]

the first 200 pages was actually my favorite part...watching daniel and armand play house; watching the rock concert massacre; etc. but the next few hundred pages, watching anne rice masturbate over her own research? not so much.

i wanted to wait to watch the movie version until after i'd finished the book, but now i'm kind of tempted just to bail and call it the lesser of two evils.

as for the other books, i'm really loving the vampire armand...the historical research there doesn't bug me nearly so much, probably because it's layered into (and actually flipping relevant to) the plot.

[brewsternorth]

Oy vey. And I thought the movie was interminable.

[qthewetsprocket]

you know a book's gonna be a chore when you end up MST-ing it, for s'truth.

and it's a shame, really, because it could be a really excellent book if rice had just cut it back a little (a bit like the problem stephen king had when he started to get really successful). the first hundred or so pages are really engaging, as long as she's concentrating on the main characters. but then rice gets all enamored of this talamasca group she's created - which, wtf; they really have no bearing in this story and no real purpose in it at all - and then there's a HUGE fucking stretch of interminably long boring backstory about these stupid martyred twins (who are, btw, the biggest literary macguffins i've ever seen in my entire life).

i'm going to put my head down and see if i can make it through, but i'm already suspecting that the time i've spent on the majority of this book is time that i'll want back on my deathbed. >:P

[kateorman]

You are interrogating this text from the wrong perspective.

[qthewetsprocket]

??? :/

[brewsternorth]

I believe that was Anne Rice's response to her detractors. Or possibly to her fanfic writers, I forget.

OK, Google (and Fandom Wank) is my friend. Apparently she threw a snit about some negative reviews on Amazon.

[qthewetsprocket]

ah, gotcha! hee. :)

it might be worth considering that when one's fan base has the perspective of, 'shall never buy another of this author's books again, if this is the sort of self-indulgent wank i'll be inundated with', then that is a perspective the author might possibly wish not to snottily attempt to invalidate, and instead re-examine why so many people are having that reaction.

[syzygy_lj]

The books go downhill from here.

[qthewetsprocket]

actually, i am really loving the vampire armand...maybe there's just less self-indulgent wank in it, or maybe i'm actually enjoying the wank, so it doesn't seem as self-indulgent? i dunno.

i'm willing to give memnoch and body thief a try, just because i like lestat as a narrator, and because armand's in them. don't think i'll be too eager to try and others though, even if they are available as cheap used copies.

[syzygy_lj]

Pandora is OK, and the one about Merrick is not bad, but I would stay away from Vittorio the Vampire and any of the ones after. They are just page after page of wank.

[qthewetsprocket]

rice's female characters consistently fail to fascinate me...they seem to evince little or no personality of their own (except for maybe gabrielle, who's basically a female armand), but for some reason we're supposed to be utterly taken with them just because rice is.

personally, i think qotd would have been a lot shorter if rice had just found three redheads and had a foursome with them, and gotten it out of her system right there and then.

[sisterjune]

See rice's long windedness was the PRECISE reason her books drove me to insanity. I really liked her characters, but the long ass discussions on philosophy and the protracted descriptions about the environment, blades of grass, and other ridiculous nonsense was just VERY irritating. Someone needs to each her the importance of being concise and to the point. Sadly I'll never know if she learned this lesson cause I long since stopped reading her books, a shame cause I used to be such a vampire chronicles fan. But I just kept feeling disappointed or like the true potential of the series wasnt being reached. Still Lestat is a dynamic complex fascinating character, and he'll probably stay in most people's minds long after the obnoxious run on text is forgotten. Or at least he has in mine.

I would recommend skipping towards the end of Queen of the Damned cause the very end actually has some wonderful character interactions and reunions and almost makes up for the miserable middle part of the book.

[qthewetsprocket]

i do get impatient with rice's loving, lengthy descriptions of furniture and interior decorating, especially when they haven't got a thing to do with the plot. ironically, then, i also get impatient when she uses more obscure/antique terms for facets of interior design that her less wealthy/less-educated-in-the-ways-of-the-interior-decorator readership (ie, me) might not be familiar with. then i just want her to say, 'there were some heavy purple velvet curtains in front of two arched, hinged windows'. there. simple, descriptive, to the point. that is, if you even need to know about the windows at all...which, frankly, most of the time in rice's writing, you don't

In honor of Anne Rice let's ALL be long winded

[sisterjune]

See I can understand if she wanted to create crisp vivid imagery of the setting, and so she wants to describe the buildings, curtains, etc. But the problem is descriptions often lose their vividness when they are drawn out or peppered with obnoxiously pretentious language. I mean what's frustrating is these are writing errors that a successful writer like Rice should have been able to avoid, these are the things we are taught NOT to do, in writing classes. They really do weaken whatever point or picture you are trying to make/create. In rice's case though, they did more than that, they were ANNOYING and took me right out of the story many times

Re: In honor of Anne Rice let's ALL be long winded

[qthewetsprocket]

In honor of Anne Rice let's ALL be long winded

:)

the thing about the long-winded descriptions is, not only are they often lengthy distractions from the main plot; they're often thrown in regardless of character appropriateness. for example, i can see lestat or marius caring about the specifics of lavish furnishings, and knowing the exact proper names for such things. but there's a lot of that stuff in the vampire armand as well, which doesn't really belong there, considering that rice herself wrote in qotd that armand is kind of ADD and doesn't really notice those sorts of things; living more in the moment and not processing little details like furniture or decoration (i think her exact wording was that he liked clothes for 'what he thought they meant' instead of what they really meant).

agreed about the female characters too. i read a blurb in rice's coming-back-to-jesus book (called out of darkness, i think?) about how she never really wanted to identify with female characters, because they were often weak or silly. which i can