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Blackwood Farm : The Vampire Chronicles

Blackwood Farm : The Vampire Chronicles

List Price: $29.95
Your Price: $18.87
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Anne Rice at her Best!
Review: I got this book about four days ago, and havent put it down save to go to work and sleep. I have always enjoyed Rice's books, and Blackwood Farm is yet another masterpiece.

Around the middle of the book I thought Id probably give it three stars, but the ending of it has made me change it back to five.

If your looking for a continuation of the early vampire chornicle style of writing - you wont find it in this book. If your looking for a lavish story of a tortured young man and his journeys as a "Blood Hunter" - then you have found it!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Anne Rice at her best!
Review: This is Anne Rice's best book in years! If you loved INTERVIEW WITH THE VMPIRE and THE WITCHING HOUR, you'll love this one too! She brings back our favorite characters at their best and introduces us to a charming new character, Quinn Blackwood. David Pittu's narration is marvelous!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Classic Anne Rice with Blackwood Farm
Review: Being an avid Anne Rice reader, Blackwood Farm was an obvious selection for me, whether good or bad. I was very pleasantly suprised to have enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed The Witching Hour. I have enjoyed each and every one of the Vampire Chronicles each with their own purpose. However, Blackwood Farm is filled with the same interesting family twists and turns of Witching Hour but with a taste of the Vampire Chronicles woven into it.

Once I picked it up, I couldn't get the story out of my mind until the last page.

Thanks to Anne Rice for another great story.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Blackwood Farm
Review: I have to say that I am a devout fan of Anne Rice. As an avid reader, I must say that when it comes to turning the last page of one of Anne Rice novels, I can just barely bring myself to do it. She has such a profound way of snaring my attention and holding on until I can barely gasp for breath.
To no such surprise she has done it agian. This book was great! I adore Tarquin and his honesty. (Though, Lestat still being the absolute.)
Anne Rice has the knack for story telling and you can truly marvel the depth of it in this book!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Anne Rice - Blackwood Farm
Review: I loved Interview with a Vampire - one of the best vamp books ever written. I lost track of the books after Lestat but I'm so glad I came back and found Blackwood Farm. Entertaining it is!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: haunting wonderment
Review: Anne Rice continues to evolve and flourish as a writer while her characters young and old grow with her. Vivid, fresh, raw; Blackwood Farm drives with an intensity of live story telling! A free flowing voice never lacking in the honesty or spontaneity that made Anne and her Vampires famous(and 'realistic'), in fact more so now. As she ages, her writing evolves with an ease and comfort always giving her characters strength, vulnerability, fears and hopes, both new and genuine. Despite the common Vampiric thread through so many of her novels her work is never lacking in originality. In Blackwood Farm a fledgling Vampire is haunted by a mysterious and dark 'twin spirit', a doppleganger. With lush, haunting and hypnotic scenery, the homes and locations are as deliciously fascinating as any characters. Enjoy!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Anne Rice Breathes New Life Into the Undead...
Review: Blackwood Farm revisits the South that Anne Rice loves so well, and treated us to a view of in past novels such as The Witching Hour and The Feast of All Saints. She dishes out to us a giant helping of deep southern lore and hospitality, exploring the perils and disgraces of the Blackwood family from its beginnings.

Quinn Blackwood, the narrator of this chronicle, reveals all of the Blackwood family history to the Vampire Lestat, whose aid he has enlisted to help rid himself of his doppelganger, Goblin, who has plagued him since birth. First a simple, laughing child along with Quinn, then teenaged seducer and lover, now something darker; more demonic and vengeful since Quinn was given the Dark Blood. Goblin has become a threat to Quinn and all those he loves, and perhaps the most lethal ghost that this wealthy Louisiana family has ever known.

From patriarch "Mad" Manfred Blackwood, to "Aunt Queen" the family sage and 'childless Mother to all', to "Pops" and "Sweetheart", the only real 'parental figures' Quinn ever really had, to his mother Patsy, the wandering country music queen wanna-be whom he despises, Anne Rice paints a full and complete picture of a Southern Family replete with ghosts, secrets, and shames through many decades, as Quinn reveals to Lestat his long history with Goblin, as well as the family's own history with spirits, and how long buried corpses have risen to haunt the family, and him, anew.

The Mayfair Witches are interwoven into this tale, with an older and wiser Michael Curray and Rowan Mayfair seen as guardians of Mona Mayfair, the newly apointed designee of the Mayfair billions, who captures Quinn's young heart. Merrick Mayfair also visits this tale, and a new member of the Talamasca, Stirling Oliver, is present as well, as all play a part in Quinn's desire to rid himself of Goblin forever.

The story, while only briefly touching upon ancient times and civilizations, as Rice has done in past Vampire tales, reads like a dark tabloid tell-all about the Blackwoods, and the secrets they hide in the swamps of Louisiana. Anne Rice does not need to wander far from her own backyard to provide an enthralling story of a vampire's history. For that I give her four stars, and a fond thank you for reinvigorating my waning interest in the vampires.

I take one star away from Anne Rice for a rushed ending. While the rest of the book plays out well and adequately paints a portrait of the Blackwoods, the last several chapters seem to pass up many opportunities with the storyline. And while I enjoyed this book tremendously, I question the focus in certain places, as the story seems to stray too far from its original premise, Quinn seeking out Lestat to help rid him of Goblin.

However, this is a fine addition to the Chronicles of the Vampires overall, is a very entertaining read, and captured my attention from page one until the end. I am happy to see Anne Rice breath new life into her cast of undead, and see hope for the damned, as it were, that they will live on in novels for years to come.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Curious Ending!
Review: I blew through this book over the weekend like the others, but I found that its ending was making me re-think the whole series. Without giving it away, I must tell you that I wonder if her series will be going in a new direction to combine a few characters and a few different storylines to make it all come together at some point. Interesting. I also saw on her website that her husband has a brain tumor, which is very bad news. Read the book and think about the end. What could it mean?

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Anne is BACK!!!!
Review: I'll keep this short and sweet... I've been an avid fan of Anne's work for many, many years. Her last couple of books were not among her best, but Blackwood Farm puts her back on top. OUTSTANDING new character (Quinn is my new fave next to the timeless "Louis") and a great plot. I certainly hope that we will hear from these characters again & I for one can hardly wait to see what Ms. Rice conjures up next!!!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: The Mighty Quinn
Review: I finished Blackwood Farm today- it only took me about three days of serious reading to get thru it. it wasn't bad but Rice's "reconciliation with the catholic church" combined with her candyapple new age physics have really harmed her fiction.
She also goes on at length about what movies she likes (thru her characters of course) alot of movies are mentioned- Amadeus, Immortal Beloved, Rebecca, Gladiator and Brannagh's Hamlet several times- it becomes jarring.
The story seems to have had the aspirations to be a darkly inverted Gone With The Wind or Rebecca - you can see Blackwood Manor as being a fledgling Manderley- creaking with restless ghosts and family secrets.
If she just uncluttered the story it would be better. If it was just about a boy that was haunted all his life by a doppelganger of himself then resolved it- it would be great because she could use the extra space to tell a sweeping generational novel about every twisted bough in the Blackwood Family Tree.
But soon there are mutiple unrelated hauntings, a vampire hermaphrodite stalks the swamps, the main character gets raped by a succubus, becomes a vampire, falls in love with a witch, Lestat shows up to stir the pot, they consult a witch/vampire to perform an exorcism on a vampire ghost (or is it ghost vampire?) etc etc etc......it's like someone took a year and a half's worth of old Dark Shadows scripts and spliced them together.
But still it wasn't bad-if you read it really fast it doesn't occur to you just how preposterous it really is
She does stick to the same formula she developed in the last book- spend 50 pages or more just to get the main character and his audience into an antique chair so he can begin to recite his story verbatim remembering every minute detail of what everyone wore and what they were thinking. The Harker Syndrome i call it- (after the character in Dracula who kept a detailed diary of events while being a prisoner of dracula-which i always thought made no sense and deflates any suspense since he obviously had to escape from whatever he is decribing if he lived to write about it). Rice should just switch to the 3rd person- it's so odd that she doesn't, considering her fetish for detail.
Also, she shys away from the epic strands of her mythology. For example, Lestat is being told the story of Blackwood Farm but before that he tells the main character that he has been not only laying on the church floor all these years- but in another place roaming with the angels, but he refuses to tell the story right now.
Now, to me that's no way to start off a new story- reminding people you didn't really resolve the last one. Also, the vampires have declared war on the Talamasca-or maybe not. but it never gets another mention.
Sadly, Rice never approaches these grand concepts. She is complacent in telling these stories as confessional autobiographies. it's a shame really- i mean how many more books does she have in her? she should really get around to these things.


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