Rating: 
Summary: It Bites. Literally.
Review: Dear Authors: if you have a number of interesting but not necessarily related ideas, take the time to flesh each one out individually in a well-plotted and well-written book. If you decide to cram them all into one short work you'll end up wih a pointless little casserole like Vittorio, the Vampire. The book starts well enough but then disintegrates; while the places are, for the most part, beautifully described, the characters are poorly drawn, the plot meanders aimlessly from pillar to post until it disappears altogether, and the various jumbled themes can't be addressed satisfactorily in a book this brief and hastily assembled. No wonder it was only $3.98.
Rating: 
Summary: A new Vampire tale, sort of.
Review: "Vittorio the Vampire" is about Vittorio, a 15th Centrey Italian knight who loves art and his family (a rare turn for an Anne Rice vampire). One night his family is given an ultematum; give vampires a tribute or the village dies. The tribute is refused, and Vittorio's family is murdered in front of him; but he spared by the beautiful vampire named Ursula. He escapes and goes after the vampires for revenge with the help of some gaurdian angels. This is Anne Rice's attempt to seperate herself from Lestat; and it dose seems more like a sequal to "Memnoch the Devil" than anything else. It has a lot to do with angel and devil worship, to a degree. There is a lot to this book that is pretty good. I liked the Ruby Grail court, it has a kind of Charles Manson like cult spooky feel to it. There are some big problems with "Vittorio the Vampire"; it is too close to "Interveiw with the Vampire", with Claudia/Ursula comparison, and the Ruby Grail court reminds me a lot of "Theater of the Vampires" that Armand run in Paris. Also it seemed like a history lesson of the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy. But all in all it is short enough to really injoy before it gets tedious.
Rating:
Summary: A guilty pleasure
Review: I really do think that Anne Rice is a good writer... however, her editors don't seem to be very good, since there are several places in the book where the sentences are awkward or down-right awful. Usually, she gives fify+ pages of fabulous writing, followed by a page or two of clumsy prose. But she quickly gets back in her groove and moves on. This book was all right. It's been a few years since I've read her stuff. I was a fan in high school. Now that I'm graduated from college, I decided to give her a try again. I can't say I was disappointed, but I did think that this book got silly in a lot of places. I wasn't too crazy about Ursula, who comes across as two-dimensional eye candy and an excuse for weird vampire sex. The love plot between Vittorio and Ursula is almost irritating. They fall in love, quite literally, at first bite, even though she was responsible for slaughtering Vittorio's entire family. The ending was super lame, but fortunately, the story was so good up to that point that it could be forgiven. It took me two days to rip through it. Very fluffy reading, but enjoyable.
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