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Summary: interesting line of passion and betrayel
Review: the story was most interesting if you enjoyed the first you would enjoy this one. Times are hard on the imajination and this book breaks the thought and reverts you in the time of it's birth.
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Summary: Sad, So Very Sad!
Review: What has happened to Anne Rice? This is a charming, intelligent, witty, and amusing writer who used to be able to translate these qualities to her fiction. This is a knack she appears to have lost or, inexplicably, abandoned. "The Vampire Armand" is preciously written, far too exquisite to bear. The complaint is not about the notion of homsexual vampires, but about the effeteness of the language which Rice employs. Where once her idiom was overripe and naughty (particularly in her "Beauty" series), now it is simply rancid and distasteful. One good thing to be said about the book: it's her best work since "Lasher". And that is very, very sad. Rice used to be great fun, even dirty fun: now she is simply churning out the perfumed prose as fast and as prolifically as her sense-dead zealots will snort it up.
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Summary: I Beg To Differ!
Review: I have just closed this book and could not disagree more with the overwhelming boos and hisses I see here! I feel the character of Armand was for the first time really defined in all his glorious emotionality and irrationality. For once I finally grasp what motivates him! A gorgeous framework has been set around this character we've only glimpsed before now and it allows you to love and admire him in part because he has no love for himself. Marius was also dragged down off his frozen character pedestal and put back into action as a real, developing pesonality. I welcomed the new intimates and old friends with as much affection as Armand. This is a book about love. The theme here is our overwhelming need for love and our frantic and often fultile search for it. Through Armand, we vicariously strive for that love. We ache and disintegrate when love fails or rejects and, through him, feel love's perfection and terrible fleetingness. Yes, I've read them all. No, this is no pale imitation! Rice uses all five of your senses. She drug me chapter by chapter over the natural break points of the story. I await the next! Will Santino be the next book? Gabrielle? I've always been curious about Khayman.....
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Summary: Not just a sequel but a thought-provoking novel.
Review: I just finished "Armand" and I am overwhelmed. This is a book the reader must think about while and after reading it. There is not the extensive concrete plot to it that is so strongly apparent in her earlier novels, so those who read ONLY for plot (as many of the negative reviews would imply) may not find this book very rewarding. (It's called "depth" people) Those of us who wish to dig a little deeper than "What happens next?" should find much to debate and discuss in this itricately crafted novel, which borders on theology. I would like to address some of the critics' comments. First, the issue of Armand acting un-Armand like. How stupid! This is Armand describing himself for the first time. The earlier telling of his tale in "Lestat" was still via Lestat. Of course he would appear different through his own eyes, knowing his own motivations. After all, the Lestat in "Interview" is nothing like the "Brat Prince" in the later novels, because he is being described by Louis. Different people always have altering perceptions of third parties in real life. To see this in Rice's fiction is not innacurate, it is the genius of her craft. Second, is the whole pedifilia issue. Armand was well into his teens when Marius saved him from a life of slavery and degredation. Most children married in their early to mid-teens in those times. Romeo and Juliette were 13 and 12 for crying out loud! That's the way it was. Period. Child labor... slavery...witch burnings and holy wars. Not pretty times...but the way it was. Should the characters have 90's standards of right and wrong? If so we'd be reading The Vampire Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, not a true discorse of the nature of evil or the validity of God as opposed to his message. One last, really rather petty thing. One writer complains that Armand has a mannish body, yet is unable to grow a beard and he (the writer) sees this as a contradiction in Armand's physical description. Well, every few generations or so, the human race begins to enter puberty earlier in life. 700 years ago, boys' voices changed later in life and body hair was later in sprouting as well. Heck, I know men in their thirties today who have next to no facial hair. As I said....petty... but stupid, uninformed comments get my dander up. Now to the story itself. Yes, it does start out disjointed when Armand begins his tale, but that is because Armand is disjointed. He has sublimated his experiences before his selling into slavery and can't remember who he is or where he came from. Only flashes come to him. Now Ms. Rice could have started the story off with Armand saying: "When I was captured I had amnesia and then this happened and later I remembered this." But she doesn't. Instead, she uses Language and Imagery to make us feel the same glimmers and fleeting bits of self-discovery Armand himself experiences. This is difficult to read. It is NOT light reading. People who don't get it or are too challenged by it drop out here. It's easier to say the book is bad than to try to understand it. I don't claim to understand it all. I need to read it again. I want to read it again. Here is what I get so far..... Armand is looking for the God, the Lord who came through his hands as the Icons. Like so many of Rice's characters, he is searching for purpose. He believes his Lord can give him purpose....this loving selfless God. He is willing to enslave himself to this God in the holy underground caves of his home. But he is ripped from this destiny and given another in the form of Marius...his new Lord. He adopts Marius' credo as his own after heaven returns him to Marius' vampiric embrace. This is not to be either and he is later enlaved to a new religion and Lord...Satan. Then Lestat comes along destroying Armands purpose anew, leaving him broken with no raison d'etre. Then Christ, his beloved Christ returns to him in the form of Veronica's Veil. He makes the ultimate sacrafice to his Lord and offers his life, but is again rejected. In his visions he feeds the masses the body of Christ and sets a dove free from a holy egg. Sets it free. Setting himself free. He need not be slave to another's ideals to save his soul or to benefit mankind. For Armand wants to be like Christ and perhaps he can. For he pictures Christ as a brother, not a Lord and creator, but a kindred spirit, a fellow human being who died for his brothers, for the love of them. "His blood might as well have been my blood too.........There was flesh and blood to what He was! And it could be bread and wine to feed the whole Earth." I feel almost as if I've trivialized it. I've not her talent for the cosmic proes that attempt to encompase heaven and hell and redemtion and the human experience.I'm not even saying my interpretation is correct, and I don't think I've done a very good job describing it here. But I will be thinking on the themes in this book and Rice's interesting and (as always) unique perspective for a long tome to come. This is a book I carry with me now. It is insightful and, yes, intricately ploted if you take time to think about it. I like books I have to think about. And, by the way, yes, I really liked this book! By the way, I didn't like the Claudia scene that other readers found distateful. But maybe I just havn't gotten it yet either. I trust Anne Rice and know it must be there for a reason.
Rating:
Summary: It's good
Review: A lot of people are complaining about Armand, and I don't see why. Yeah, some parts could have been better, and some scenes were too graphic, but all in all, it was a good book.
Rating: 
Summary: vampires rehashed to the point of mediocrity
Review: Rice used to be a good author. Much of "Armand" is a repeat of all we've read before, except for it's continuous, voluminous and tedious referrals to religion and the constant homosexual encounters of the vampires and mortals. These episodes are not even erotic though exceedingly graphic. Religion and gay sex just seem compromised under the same covers. This once avid fan will probably avoid these endless, rambling tomes in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Weak,not the quality of her earlier books,I was dissapointed
Review: Weak, certainly not the quality of her earlier books, as an avid Rice fan -- I was dissapointed.
Rating: 
Summary: The Vampire Armand
Review: I absolutely loved this book. I've always wanted to know the story behind Armand. In The Interview with the Vampire, it tells so little about his past. I recomend this book to anyone that enjoys reading Anne Rice's books. Even to those that do not, it is excellent. Her books are so easy to get into because even if you have not read her previous books in the Vampire Chronicles, it all still makes sense..it doesn't start off from a point and continue. Her books are their own stories. I give it two thumbs up.
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Summary: This is the worst book I have ever purchased!
Review: If you enjoy homosexual love affairs and the molesting of young boys then this is the book for you. Personally such material offends me and I will never buy an Anne Rice product again!
Rating: 
Summary: Anne, Have you been kidnapped by hollywood
Review: I loved the first four Vampire books. But the last three were not that great. These 3 were depressing to say the least.I was disappointed in the Vampire Armand. I dont mind the gay/bi stuff but I did mind the experiments with Claudia. That bothered me. I also found Benji and Sybelle as dull and non dimensional characters. I found myself thinking that I want the Old Anne Rice back, not someone kidnapped by hollywood. I hope that the next vampire book she writes will resurrect Lestat, and continue the relationship between Louis and Lestat. Anne stop vacillating about religion, some people read books to take their minds off the state of the world. I know that I certainly do.
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