Merrick
Lambda Award nominee 2000.
The Vampire Armand finished with a tantalising moment – the Vampire Lestat rising from the dead in present-day New Orleans to walk again among Anne Rice's unforgettable undead.
Now Lestat lives again but in a twilight world of music and memory. In this volume it is his mesmerizing friend and coeval Louis de Pointe du Lac (originating in 18th century France and Interview with the Vampire) who is tortured by the memory of the child vampire, Claudia, whom he loved and lost. With the help of David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the secret Talamasca organisation, Louis calls on the help of Merrick, young and gorgeous mixed-race by-blow of the rich New Orleans Mayfair clan. To save Louis' sanity, Merrick must use her black witchcraft to call up the ghost of Claudia – however dangerous this may be. There are other Mayfair spirits who will not lie still, and her search takes her close to the edge, through blood and terror, ritual and violence.
Sweeping from New Orleans to the Brazilian jungle and the island of Haiti, this is vampire literature at its most tantalising, sexy and irresistible.
Anne Rice
Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien; 1941–2021) was an American author of gothic fiction, Christian literature, and erotic literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. Books from The Vampire Chronicles were the subject of two film adaptations - Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Queen of the Damned (2002).
Born in New Orleans, Rice spent much of her early life there before moving to Texas, and later to San Francisco. She was raised in an observant Catholic family but became an agnostic as a young adult. She began her professional writing career with the publication of Interview with the Vampire in 1976, while living in California, and began writing sequels to the novel in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, following a publicized return to Catholicism, Rice published the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, fictionalized accounts of certain incidents in the life of Jesus. Several years later she distanced herself from organized Christianity, citing disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church's stances on social issues but pledging that faith in God remained "central to [her] life." However, she later considered herself a secular humanist.
The Vampire Chronicles
The Vampire Chronicles consists of thirteen books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
Related series New Tales of the Vampires
