• The Good: Dark, gothic drama with an anti-heroic vampire
• The Bad: Slow and ponderous; plot that serves the philosophical conversations and character development
• The Literary: The body thief sends short stories to Lestat as hints, including H. P. Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep

Following the events of The Queen of the Damned, the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt finds himself depressed and alone. He’s plagued by nightmares of long dead Claudia. Feelings of remorse overwhelm him, and he attempts to limit his victims to murderers and criminals but still takes an innocent life when temptation strikes; then he falls into another cycle of remorse.

One of his remaining friends is the human Talamasca agent David Talbot. Lestat repeatedly offers the dark gift to David, who, despite his advanced years, outright refuses it. Lestat admits to his friend that he believes he’s found a way to commit suicide, traveling to the Gobi desert and flying so high that he’ll have nowhere to hide when the sun rises. Alas, when Lestat does survive, albeit with terrible suffering, he convalesces at David’s house in the Cotswolds’.

This is all the setup to the main conflict of this novel, in which an ex-Talamasca agent, Raglan James, contacts Lestat with a proposal. Raglan claims he has the ability to swap consciousnesses between bodies, and he proposes a body switch with Lestat, allowing Lestat to be human once again.

Just about everything that can go wrong does. The other vampires warn Lestat against the dangers of this endeavor and so turn their backs on him. Raglan is a thief and a liar. Lestat does get to experience being a human again, but it isn’t what he remembers. And so many adventures ensue.

I’ll admit that although I’ve thus far spent many paragraphs on the plot, the plot isn’t what makes the story shine. It’s Lestat, his selfish and passionate nature, together with the many quiet philosophical conversations he has throughout novel. There is much talk of God and the role of good and evil, but this time with the help of two humans—David, who claims to have seen God and the Devil, and a missionary nun who isn’t sure she believes in God at all.

The setting is present day, so the imagistic gothic elements aren’t as prevalent. But the gothic prose, the verbose and languid sentence composition, are common. There’s a tendency to fall into description of a building, or a feeling, or a moment in time. Like what it must feel like to experience eating when you haven’t done it in two hundred years, which reads surprisingly funny.

Lestat, the simultaneous hero and anti-hero. You root for him and you dismiss his mistakes, until you can’t. He is ultimately his own villain. Lestat is ever more reckless and vain, subject to his own dramatic flights of fancy. We’ve known who Lestat is since the beginning. Louis said as much in Interview. It’s here in this story that Lestat does many things that feel unforgivable, yet I still want to read more.  You could argue that Lestat gets a pass because he’s a vampire and has a completely different moral code, but Louis is tormented by his own very different, very human moral code. It must be that Anne Rice magic that keeps me coming back.

Highly recommended for fans of complex characters and ornate prose.