Blood and Gold

Rating:
Summary: Vacuous and superficially pleasing
Review: I believe that Anne Rice's style and substance has greatly deteriorated over the years, and I am not complaining about her attempts at new material.

This book, Blood and Gold, is stylistically very rich, with careful descriptions of candles and gemstones, as if the reader has "vampire eyes." The story, unfortunately, leaves much to be desired. The characters are very weak and poorly developped, for example. The novel opens with the story of a vampire previously unknown to everyone seeking out Marius, an old, established character. While their interaction is interesting, it contradicts Marius's own preference to remain reticent and solitary - he states this many times in the telling of his life, regarding how he avoided other vampires and such. The conflicts in character continue - dangerously swerving between love and hate at all times. The most puzzling aspect of Marius and the rest of the characters is that they all seem like children. Marius perpetually pines for a long lost love, but with all their "preternatural" abilities, he should be able to find her. He treats one vampire he sires [Amadeo/Armand] with abandonment, and another [Bianca] with excessive attention that she seems unable to fend for themselves. But, these are the same vampires as those in her earlier books, and they are able to fend for themselves. They know their talents and abilities. Marius, a once stoic and reserved Roman patrician, shows himself to be a blubbering nitwit from English Romanticism ["Oh my long lost Pandora...I can't find you...even though I can fly, and know lots of other vampires, and you wear big flashy jewels, and Europe is only so big."]

Characters are introduced and never revisted, and never introduced and abruptly revisted. They are simply there as fodder, it seems, to bring the page count of this novel to 478. The story is dubious and questionable - it's been told already in The Vampire Lestat and The Vampire Armand, but of course, he convieniently has MORE to tell in those things he just forgot to mention to Lestat and Armand.

Ah well. Anne Rice has tried far too hard - the stories of the past are already told and gone, and recreating something as such is only folly.