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Queen of the Damned (Vampire Chronicles, Book III)

Queen of the Damned (Vampire Chronicles, Book III)

List Price: $27.95
Your Price: $19.57
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Akasha, a Royal Pain in the Derrier
Review: An Absolute Classic By Anne Rice. Readers will be introduced to many key players in this novel, that will later on be revisited in their own settings. Sort of a Prequel sequel. A lot of jumping around, so pay close attention. Spectacular, i loved it!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Well, I'll be damned...
Review: The main message remains as clear and complicated as ever, the art of being human and what it is to be human.

Rice's books have always had an underlying tone of loneliness, that aching feeling that immortality would wrought. It is the obsessions of all humans as it continues but never ends and hopefully it never will. This story is tinged with a note of nostalgia, regret, longing, pain and suffering infused with wonder, beauty, love, questioning, pain and hope. It is philosophy eloquently captured in the words and phrases of a gifted, talented and insightful writer. What more could you ask for? I completely fell in love with Queen of the Damned.

Readers who want a straight forward translation or a simple expression of words will not only be somewhat dissatisfied but may not find the patience that it need and takes for this kind of book. She does doesn't just do 'recap' but goes more indepth with the mythology of Akasha. In the 2nd book, we only got one perspective and a limited one at that. Perosnally, I enjoyed the historical tale behind the main story.

Each chapter is its own, diverse in the beginning and all coming together quite beautifully. The stories that are within the story give you a broader perspective on many different characters. Many new characters are reintroduced, no new chracters actually come up, everyone in QotD have been mentioned before.

However, I definitely loved certain parts better than others. With the 2nd one, I loved the whole thing, end of story. QotD, while I absolutely love it, a few small parts, I felt, could have been left out, shortened or expanded on. These are parts where many people get bored or impatient...BUT...don't give up!!! Keep going and read, you won't regret it. You really need to read it on its own merit rather than what others say. Keep an open and broad mind, if you're too biased with Rice's provocative ideas (on philosophy, religion and human nature in general), you won't enjoy the story as much. Truly, words really can't express how amazing this book genuinely is.

Rice has always done an amazing job interjecting humor and clever bits into the story to soften the harshness of her motifs; you'll find that QotD is much darker than the first two. The dark material is engrossing, it captivated my attention completely. It's still the heavy and heady subject matter that Rice tackles eloquently, and OH! she does so graphically and beautifully. I still can't believe she wrote this in '88; the perceptions that she presents are so current, trascending.

It has its own enigmatic allure that I've fallen in love with. Rice never answers her own questions that are posed in the book by characters, but merely imbues solutions, possible answers that are left up to the reader. She makes you think, this is no wham-bam-thank-you-'mam book. She still uses her words like an ink pen, voluptuous, full and satisfying. The descriptions are fantastic and you know exactly how it looks, how it feels.

If you don't love it as I do, you will at least appreciate her story or at least her writing, which are both blow-your-mind fantastic on their own accord. READ, read and re-read Queen of the Damned.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Story
Review: Where beauty and intricate characters made "The Vampire Lestat" a wonderful novel, fabulous story-telling takes over in "Queen of the Damned." Rice creates many detail stories (great in themselves) that come together in a spectacular ending that makes one crave the next volume. Very feminist.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A Lot of back story
Review: Queen of the Damned follows directly from the Vampire Lestat. But before the reader can find out who is in Lestat's coffin with him at the end of the earlier book (although it's not much of a surprise), one must traverse several chapters of back story. In fact three quarters of the book is back story.
The main story is rather lifeless and I don't find Lestat an especially appealing character. The whole Rock star bit was extremely lame.
The history of vampires is interesting but it reads like a history, it has no story arc, and little drama. Drama that should be supplied by the main story just isn't there.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: IT WAS GREAT
Review: I have read all of Anne Rice's books and have found them all excellent. And this book is no exception. What I like best about her books is the way she portrays her vampires with such humanity yet at the same time doesn't let us forget that they are monsters.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Languid, velvety worlds
Review: The third in Anne Rice's famous Vampire Chronicles, exquisite if you like purple prose and intricately laced descriptions of a setting now inextricably linked to the goth movement, and an inspiration to vampire fans the world over.
I really like Anne Rice, because it's easy to lose yourself in her languid, velvety worlds with their heavy scents and charismatic inhabitants.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Akasha's Revenge
Review: This book is great if you are into vampires and vampire violence, blood, gore, and excitment, but if you are not I would not recommend you reading this. For those of you out there who love vampire related things, this book is perfect for you. While you are reading the context, you actually feel like you are there. Anne Rice does a great job of making your skin crawl as she describes the quick attacks that the vampires make in the middle of the night on their prey. She makes it feel like you are in a thriller movie when she tells how fast they can move and sneak up on their prey like the action figure Quicksilver. You do not even know that the vampire has you until you feel his fangs in your skin.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Queen of the Damned
Review: This book is about A Vampire gone "rock-star" which i think is weird but anyway. It was ok. the book was wonderful.i had also seen the movie and I loved it. do also know that they're where supose ot be longer that it was but we all know it was because of the death of Aaliyah.:( it was really sad. But my favorite part of it all (in the movie),is when Lastat is with Jesse in his house,I think,and she wants him to "show her what it's like" and when he does, it's sch a beautiful seen because it shows that she'd so anything to be with him and he starts to notice that.But the thing I don't get is why would akasha wait 200 or 300 years to wake when she gave blood to Lastat..it's almost as if she was lazy to wake, and It had to be at that point when he was a "rock-star" and falling for Jesse.But afcourse the book wasnt the same as the movie..I be honest I've seen the movie about 50 times. and I'm not joking. Ihave the movie on a tape(copy) and the tape is wearing out.I'd have to copy it again. My sisters get annoyed by me watching it over and over again.. i even know the lines by heart.and i'm not joking for that eather.If some was to watch it with me. they's notice i'd be speaking they're words.Now just talking about it I feel like watching the movie again

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Immensely important yet problematic
Review: The Queen of the Damned is strikingly different in both form and substance from the first two books of The Vampire Chronicles. Several new characters are introduced, a number of truly old vampires we have only heard of up until now become part of the action, and the story is woven together into a mosaic much more wide in scope from what has come before. This is essentially Lestat's book, but he is not really the focus of the tale; while he narrates his own role in events, much of the book is written in the third person. This, plus the addition of so many new characters and the truly elaborate scope that is covered, makes this novel much less cohesive than the first-person narratives of the first two books. The action is spread out over six thousand years from one end of the world to the other, with a lot of mythology and pondering taking the place of the thrilling, energetic action of the earlier novels.

The book begins a week or two before Lestat's legendary rock concert and the ensuing mayhem that erupted outside the auditorium on that night. We follow the paths of other vampires in the days prior to this, including Armand and Daniel, the young man from Interview With the Vampire. We also learn that the immolation of vampires that Lestat, Louis, and Gabrielle saw that night had actually begun several days earlier, as a number of covens were destroyed by Akasha, the newly awakened Queen of the Damned. After the story of her awakening is told, the book takes on a somewhat mystical air. Almost all vampires are dreaming of two red-headed young women preparing to feast upon their dead mother, only to be taken prisoner by soldiers while their village is destroyed around them. The true significance of the red-headed twins does not become clear until the final hundred pages of the book, for their tale is an integral part of the story behind vampirism's very existence. We already knew that Enkil and Akasha, ancient rulers of Egypt, were the first vampires. Now, the whole history of the King and Queen is revealed, including the curse that accompanied their transformation. Rice goes out of her way to explain the beginning of vampirism in a unique way, although the facts of the matter seem a little too elaborate and far-fetched to me.

The one real weakness I find in the novel is Akasha's agenda. She is not exactly the altruistic type, and her mission to save mankind sounds ingenuous at best. It is also a rather laughable plan; having spent the past six thousand years in contemplative thought, I would have expected a character of her strength and moxie to have come up with a plan much better than this one. The final conflict, one prefigured for hundreds of pages in the slow unveiling of the Legend of the Twins, ends so quickly I was forced to stop and make sure I hadn't somehow skipped a paragraph or two. Basically, it's all over in one sentence. Even Lestat is not himself here; I actually enjoyed the stories of the other vampires and the history of the accidental birth of vampirism in Akasha more than I enjoyed the action related first-hand by Lestat. Certainly, Rice is to be commended for vastly expanding her vampire universe and having her characters deeply examine their lives and their purposes on earth, but I just could not fully connect with this novel. Still, it is an essential book for Anne Rice fans, as it offers up loads of information about the vampires who roam the world of her creation and explains the very origins of vampirism itself.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Lame
Review: This is a book that does not know its place. What should be pulpy fun, is instead masquarading as Important Literature. Rice has really misfired with this book. I wasn't a fan of _Interview_ but I thought that _Vampire Lestat_ was an improvement. Here the train has derailed though. The end of the previous novel in the series (Vampire Lestat) seems to indicate that we will finally be getting some action that happens in the present tense. Wrong. This book, like the first two, is almost completely about events that happened in the distant past. It's about time that Rice let her vampires walk around in the present world. The continuous re-writing of her own pseudo-history is also beginning to be a real drag. Let's pick a origin story and stick with it!

The Queeen, when she finally makes her plan known, turns out to be about the biggest unintentionally idiotic character in modern fiction (ok, that's an overstatement, but still). She seriously seems to believe that killing off most of the men on earth will create a peaceful, harmonious planet. But even if that were true, which it is not, why would the Queen want to create such a planet? She's a damn vampire! She's not supposed to have human concerns, as Rice points out continually about her "lesser" vampires in the first two books of the series. The plot twist is completely hair-brained.

And then there's the climax. The whole novel builds toward the battle between this ultra-powerful queen and the ragtag group of rebels. There is some philosphical garbage they spout at each other, and then the the battle occurs in the space of about three sentences. End of story. It makes you want to throw the book in the ocean. I'm not sure that it's worth reading the next installment after this fiasco, but I suppose I'll give it a shot, simply based on the goodwill Rice got from me after Vampire Lestat. As for Queen of the Damned, the book is as bad as the movie. And that's about the worst insult you can hurl at a piece of fiction.


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