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Summary: Waagghh!~^o^~ How could Anne DO this to me?! :(
Review: For YEARS & YEARS I've waited for her to make Louis & Lestat a couple & now she's crushed the rock of hope & squeezed out all the delicious juice of a developing relationship by tossing in some bimbonic cookie!Merrick makes Louis fall for her so he'll make her a Vampire & when he realizes what she's done he wants her more & Lestat ends up givin the couple his blessings in the end! ::tears book in 2:: ARG!!
Rating: 
Summary: Beating A Dead Horse-er-Vampire
Review: With "Merrick", Anne Rice promises to return us to the world of the Vampires and the Mayfair Witches. The combining of both supernatural worlds seems almost too good to resist. What a letdown. I had stopped reading her books after "Lasher" because I felt she was now writing at the mercy of a publishing schedule . The original allure that was in "Interview..." and "The Vampire Lestat" had been lost as she tried to get one book out a year and I felt the stories had become lackluster. Sadly that's how I felt about this novel as well. No one can deny that Rice is a wonderful writer, who illustrates her work with a sweeping romantic narrative, but I felt cheated here. The first hundred pages or so is almost nothing but recap from the previous novels as David Talbot introduces the title character. The promised Mayfair witches have a family relation to Merrick, but are only seen in one chapter of the book. The child vampire Claudia is used as a major plot point to propel the novel which felt old, and like an easy way out. Even Lestat seems like a hack, showing up in the last forty pages in what feels like a glorified cameo. I feel like she should put these characters to rest for a while and find a new subject to write about.I loved the early books and wanted to love this as well, and based on some of the other reviews I'm probably in the minority. However I can't say a book is good just because it contains characters I think were great.
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Summary: Bring on the next installment!
Review: Since everybody else seems to be describing the happenings of the book, I will skip over that. I will say that I thought the story was amazing and I was incredibly sad to be done reading the book. Like most of Anne Rice's other books, you get totally engrossed, and almost believe the characters are real. I wish the book was longer! However, the ending (won't ruin the surprise here by giving it away) leaves you yearning to find out what happened. And there's certainly got to be a sequel to Merrick's story!
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Summary: One of the best in the Vampire series in years!
Review: I've read all the Vampire books...Rice is amazing though I think I read the newer books just to keep up. After Queen of the Damned, I wasn't too thrilled w/ anything. Pandora, Armand, Vittorio...eh. However, Merrick grabbed me and brought me on a wonderful thrilling adventure! A number of times I found myself tearing through the pages with almost a maddening ferocity! It's been a number of years since that'S happened... I loved the first 3 books, mainly 2-3 though...Lestat and Queen. This is right up there IMO. It's got the typical Rice eloquence so even though the later books didn't interest me as much, she always paints a beautiful world for you to explore. A friend found this book 'boring' but I can't see how that's possible! The formula deviates slightly from Rice's recent publications, but retains that feel that can only be summoned by the author. This book ties in the Mayfair Witches (Witching Hour series) with the Vampire books, but the former is only a small portion. This is a Vampire book all in all, and I highly recommend it. If you've has kept up with that series, I think it's a must read...especially if you've become somewhat bored with the recent Vampire books...this is a breath of fresh air, and an amazing tale. One I won't soon forget.
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Summary: The Next Stage: Vampire Chronicles
Review: I have to start by saying I was a little bit leery about this book. After reading other reviews, I was afraid that this would not be up to the usual standard of the rest of the Chronicles. My fears were unfounded. This latest edition of The Vampire Chronicles not only lived up to my hopes, it opens the door to a new and exciting future: the beginning of a fusion of The Vampire Chronicles with the Mayfair Witches and the Talamasca. What a wonderful direction to take her world of Supernatural characters and entities! In typical Anne Rice fashion, I had to READ the first third of this book. I found it difficult to assimilate everything being told because the story seemed to be fragmented. Did this stop me? Of course not! This is the style I have come to love from Anne Rice. I almost have to force myself to get part way through, and then BANG! It all starts to come together and make perfect sense. (Remember The Queen of the Damned?) Some of my favorite characters are back. David Talbot, who is the perfect storyteller, starts in the present, takes us back to a time before he became the David Talbot he is today, and introduces us to a fascinating character: Merrick Mayfair. Descended from the (in)famous Mayfair Witches, Merrick is a witch, a temptress, and a riveting part of David's past. This part of the story is told passionately by David, as he recounts the tale of his life as Superior General of the Talamasca, in terms of his contact with Merrick. David has come to see Merrick in the present day to ask her to help his friend (and one of my favorites) Louis de Pont du Lac. Louis is still grieving for, and possessed by Claudia, the child vampire he and Lestat created. David asks Merrick to call Claudia's spirit for Louis, who wants to know if she is suffering. Even though this happens late in the book, it is an essential part of the story. I will not ruin the book by saying any more, but, suffice to say, it is possibly the most important thing to happen to Louis since he was made a vampire. The result of the "coming" of Claudia changes and reshapes him forever. And best of all, Anne give us (drum roll) The Return Of Lestat de Lioncourt! Of course, this happens near the end, but we know there will be more to come. The Vampire Chronicles Will Continue!
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Summary: Great Reading
Review: Just when you thought it was safe for a bloodsucker to go out in the dark in New Orleans, along comes Merrick Mayfair, a sultry, hard-drinking octoroon beauty whose voodoo can turn the toughest vampire into a marionette dancing to her merry, scary tune. In Merrick, Anne Rice brings back three of her most wildly popular characters--the vampires Lestat and Louis and the dead vampire child Claudia--and introduces them to the world of her Mayfair Witches book series. It is Louis who brings about the collision of the fang and voodoo universes. Louis made Claudia a vampire in Rice's classic Interview with the Vampire, in which she was destroyed, and now he's obsessed with raising her ghost to make amends and seek guidance from the beyond. (Claudia physically resembles Rice's young daughter who died of a blood-related illness. Rice nearly died of a diabetic coma in 1998, and writing Merrick turned her excruciating recovery into an exhilarating burst of creativity). Vampire David Talbot lobbies Merrick to call Claudia's spirit and slake Louis's guilt, but Talbot winds up in the grip of an obsession with the witch. You see, Talbot, unlike most vampires, lived 70 years as a human, so his sexual response to humans is still as strong as his blood thirst. Merrick can cast spells to make men crave her, and Talbot is tormented. After she reads his palm, he muses, "I wanted to take her in my arms, not to feed from her, no, not harm her, only kiss her, only sink my fangs a very little, only taste her blood and her secrets, but this was dreadful and I wouldn't let it go on." The secrets of Merrick are dark and sensuous, but the book is a romp animated by Rice's feeling of coming back to life through the magic of a literary outpouring. The narrative flashes back to the past, to an Indiana Jones-ish adventure in a Guatemalan cave, and to scenes from many other Rice novels. It may be helpful to read Merrick with the Rice-approved guidebooks The Vampire Companion and The Witches' Companion at hand. After many books, Rice's grand Vampire Chronicles tale was in peril of getting long in the tooth. Merrick Mayfair's magic represents an infusion of fresh blood.
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Summary: Merrick prepares the way for great things to come.
Review: As a long-standing fan of Anne Rice's work, I always wait with high expectations for the release of her latest novel. Over the past few years my expectations have only rarely been met. Fortunately, "Merrick", her first attempt to bring the worlds of the Mayfair and the vampires together, was well worth the read. Returning to beloved New Orleans (a place that Rice brings to such life with her words that I can smell the town, hear the french quarter, and see the beauty of it) David and Louis set out to contact the soul of Claudia--Louis and Lestat's long-dead blood-daughter. To this end we meet Merrick--an old friend of David's from the Talamasca as well as a distant relative of the Mayfairs. Obviously, there are dozens of reviews out there about this book, I will only comment on the few elements that stood out most to me. Point One: the history. It seems that Rice cannot write a book anymore that doesn't include at least a hundred (if not several hundred) pages of back-story. And while our favorite characters may be spell-bound by the story they're hearing, quite often I'm left with a feeling of "who cares?". We seem to be constantly bogged down with so much history that we miss our long-standing favorite characters as well as their current experiences in the process (in other words: plot). Although, Merrick and her history were a welcome (and uniquely interesting) addition to this piece, they in no way compared with the last hundred pages of the book. Point Two: the last hundred pages of the book. Finally, after so many books of stasis (since "Memnoch", really) we have a book that truly leads us forward--a book that you can come away from feeling that things will not be the same in the future. A book that does what any good book should--brings change about in the characters as well as their circumstances. We end this one and know that things are changing--long-standing characters are now traveling different paths and if the teaser she left us with at the end of the book continues into later volumes, the future of our vampire clan is in danger and could make for some great stories to come. So, Miss Rice, bring it on. We're ready! But please, with all due respect, keep us in the present as much as possible, the past is becoming tedious.
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Summary: Lavish and Sexy, as only Anne Rice can do it . . .
Review: Before I start talking about this latest book, let me talk of Anne Rice herself. She is, and always will be, my favorite writer of all time (next to maybe Shakespeare). Her books are almost always complicated, and always beg for one to think about what metaphors her books may have been hinting at. Beyond that, her writing style is sensuous and dream-like. When she writes, all one can see is beauty even in the most gruesome places. No one can make evil sound more seductive or beautiful than Anne Rice. Not only is her writing style beautiful and almost poetic to read, but she's practically a genius. Her stories are a brilliant tapestry of horror, gothicism, romance, alternate history, fantasy, and perhaps even a touch of science fiction here or there. Her books are well researched and historically accurate, and I just adore the little references to Shakespeare and Keats, and the way she intertwines her tales with actual historic events. Also, her characters are infinitely complicated, and her books are choked with interesting discussions of philosophy and theories concerning the paranormal. Above all, she writes about beauty. Her vampire, for instance, is the perfect vampire. Indescribably beautiful, intelligent, seductive, powerful, immortal, and sexually alluring. Merrick is the latest installation in her critically acclaimed, best-selling series collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles. The first book in this series is the now-classic Interview with the Vampire, which was first published in 1976. (Interview was made into a movie in the year 1994, starring Tom Cruise as Lestat, Brad Pitt as Louis, Kirsten Dunst as Claudia, Antonio Banderas as Armand, and Christian Slater as Daniel the boy interviewer.) This latest chapter is the story of Merrick Mayfair, a mixed blood descendent of the infamous Mayfair witches living in New Orleans. The Mayfair witches are a large and wealthy family, first introduced in The Witching Hour. There have been two sequels to this book, Lasher and Taltos. Merrick, however, is the first book to directly connect her witch series and her vampire series, which is something that I find rather pleasing, as I'm sure it will other die-hard fans of Anne Rice. Merrick, however, is of a mixed breed of African, French, Native American, and other nameless peoples, who holds contempt for what she refers to as the "white" Mayfairs. She is a powerful witch who knows Voodoo, passed on from her ancestors. At the age of thirteen, she is taken in by an ancient, powerful organization known as the Talamasca. The Talamasca is a group of psychics who have been around for centuries. As their motto goes, they watch and they are always here. To clarify, they investigate the paranormal, but have a strict policy of non-interference. They know about vampires and witches, and other such beings, and keep massive records. As an adult, Merrick has become a full-fledged member of the Talamasca. While in New Orleans, she is approached by her old friend David Talbot, former leader of the Talamasca, but now a vampire, created by Lestat several years prior. He has come to Merrick on behalf of the vampire Louis, who understands how powerful a witch she is. Louis wishes for Merrick to call forth the spirit of the deceased vampire child Claudia. Without recounting the entire novel, we learn Merrick's life story, including a fascinating account of her trip into the jungles of South America with David as a young woman, where she believes that the spirit of her Oncle Vervain tells her she will find something that will change her destiny. As it turns out, she finds a jade mask in a cave that enables her to see spirits. It's all very interesting how the story comes together at the end. After finding the mask, Merrick begins to believe that it wasn't her Oncle Vervain at all who sent her to find the mask--she begins to believe that it was her dead sister Honey in the Sunshine, who wanted Merrick to use the mask to help bring her across. As it turns out, Merrick uses the mask to help call on Claudia. Claudia does come, but she is an embittered, hateful spirit, who despises Louis more than ever. Louis, who loved Claudia more than anything, is hurt, but the encounter also gives him the courage to do what he always wanted to but never could before: end his own life. Louis has always been a tragic creature--the most human of them all. He hates his existence, but could never bring himself to end it out of fear of what comes after death. Also, Louis is my favorite character and I would never read another Anne Rice novel if she killed off my beloved Louis. But as luck would have it, his plans for self-destruction are interrupted when he falls madly in love with Merrick, which causes David jealousy, who has always loved her. Unable to resist her, another surprise occurs when Louis makes her into a vampire--his first fledgling since the doomed Claudia over a century before. In a fit of guilt, he tries to kill himself in the day's sunlight, but it turns out that he is too old to die so simply. Merrick finds him the next night, and with the help of David and Lestat, they use their blood to save Louis. A little bit of backstory on Lestat--he has always been the mischeivous one; the one who loves to be loved and worshipped by mortals and immortals alike; the one who is evil because it is his nature to be so, but who has a loving heart at the core. Lestat has to be the most complicated character of them all. He is evil because he is a vampire, and therefore feels no guilt because it is his nature to kill, like a lion hunting a lesser species for food. And yet, he doesn't kill needlessly, but he enjoys killing when he does. He takes perverse pleasure out of hunting down the evildoer--letting the evildoer die by the hands of something more evil and powerful than himself is the ultimate justice, and the ultimate pleasure for Lestat. Lestat is also truly immortal. He has drank from the blood of the elders, and is one of the most powerful and indestructable vampires in existence. Also, despite his carelessness and spontenaeity, he is loved by everyone. People adore Lestat. But something happened to him in the novel Memnoch the Devil. It was a very Faust-like experience that affected him greatly. For the longest time, he laid down in a chapel in New Orleans, unmoving. Occassionally, music would awaken him, but he always went back into his seemingly empty state. That is, until the day Louis tried to kill himself. He woke up to use his powerful blood to help Merrick and David save Louis. After that, Lestat started to become himself again. And Louis, strengthened by Lestat's powerful blood as well, was okay--emotionally as well as physically. As it turned out, Oncle Vervain saw the future. Years before, he knew that Merrick would find the mask and use it to raise the spirit Claudia, and that Louis would fall in love with her and make her a vampire. In that way, her destiny had been changed, and Louis had nothing to be ahsamed of. I very much liked the way it tied together at the end, and I'm pleased that both Louis and Lestat turned out to be fine at the end. And I like this relationship between Merrick and Louis. As I said, Louis is my favorite character, and for years he has drifted in an eternal state of melancholy. But now he has Merrick to make him happy, as well as Lestat and David. The ending was also very enjoyable. It ended with enough of a closure to keep you satisfied, but with just enough of a cliffhanger to let you know that there will be a sequeal. (As if we ever doubted it.) Overall, I would say it is a very pleasing book for Anne Rice fans, although first-time readers should find it enjoyable as well. The idea of a magic mask may be a bit of a stretch, but the way the peices of the story were intelligently interwoven more than made up for it. It was also fast-paced and exciting, and as always, beautifully written. As I've said a million times in the past, Anne Rice will live on in the ages of literature. In the future, high school and college students will be studying her work. Oh, wait, they already do in some schools . . .
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Summary: The more things change, the more they stay the same . . .
Review: Dear Ms. Rice, With the Vampire Chronicles, you have brought to your readers a better expression of the relationship between the lover and his beloved than Plato, Mann, Kundera or just about ANYONE could ever have dared to dream of creating. And you had it right all along: ALL things change, except Christ's, (excuse me, Lestat's) love for us (I mean, Louis). Timeless, sexless, beyond human comprehension, and utterly heartbreaking. You can stray away from time to time and involve yourself in frivolous pursuits (like Merrick), but please, go home: to Lestat and his immortal beloved, Louis. You know the way!
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Summary: Anne Rice Gets Back to Her Fantastic Writing Form
Review: Anne Rice has done it again! I think that her illness has helped her by creating fresh ideas to write about. What a better idea than to have the Witches meet the Vampires. I disagree with other viewer's remarks that these ideas are stupid, lack depth,etc. I think that Anne Rice is a excellent story-teller and I can definitely believe that a world with vampires and witches exists-it's puts one right in the action. I think that this book, "Merrick" is also the best book since "Memnoch the Devil" and "The Tale of the Body Thief". I did not like her last two short mini-novels, "Pandora" and " The Vampire Armand". They lacked substance and originality. Keep it up, Anne Rice!!
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