crowning Prince Lestat.

It's the undead high school reunion you've been waiting for. Or rather the secret vampire club hidden inside your high school you felt you belonged to, whether you first discovered Interview with the Vampire as a curious little paperback in 1976 or climactic The Queen of the Damned in 1988 or the ambitious cosmological heresy of Memnoch the Devil in 1995. Prince Lestat of 2014 is the offering you never thought would happen again after Anne Rice's re-embracing of Catholicism/Christianity after the second major death in her life. But the undead never die, lucky us.

This eternal return is complete with everything you remember: the hand-to-forehead, tragically blessed soulful vampires, effete & elegant, as Anne Rice first redefined them. Worshippers of beauty who see the world through the lens of night whose existence is sustained by life itself -- blood. By now these ideas popularized by Rice are decades old, have birthed and faded RPGs/LARPs, A/B film offerings, and countless diaspora in the horror & paranormal romance & urban fantasy genres. Ergo, you may suspect that the original characters and their behavioural conceits parody themselves by now. Yet while Lestat & Co are the same vampires, the 21st century is certainly not the same world they've spun their many memoirs about, nor does the current challenge that faces them allow for things to remain unchanged.

The creeper vine ornamented Prince Lestat UK dust jacket.

In this, the best aspect of Prince Lestat is its return to the dynamics of the mythology Rice invented, filling in early vampiric history of Akasha's Queen's Blood faction versus the twins' First Brood, and how such factions may effect how some of the ancients see each other 6,000 years later. Part of the big success of the series has to do with giving the reader a dark secret they can savour, and it could be argued that once the origins were handed out over the course of the first three books, the latter-day secrets in the rest didn't have as much gravity, but what unfolds in this latest book definitely delivers.

And if you enjoyed the narrative structure of Queen of the Damned with its assembly of the cast before the third act, then you'll cotton to Prince Lestat. The cavalcade of new names also implies the possibility that Prince Lestat's but the first of many more installments.

One can't help but notice a disconnect from 2003's Blood Canticle, where a less than isolated Lestat actually does pull himself away from his spiritual ennui long enough to help out the Mayfair clan Rice features in her other witch-centric series. Instead we're again given a Lestat still claiming he's almost damaged beyond hope, who loathes contact, and cares not for what happens to his peers. This works for the arc of the book, but proves partially incongruent for the series.

Rice points out that the literature of the vampire is a cultural vessel, that these texts provide answers & context for the undead as well as their mortal audience. In a metafictive way, Rice self-references the impact of her own books in her vampires' world & in the real one in terms of exploding the genre with her inspiration. It's a brag, but one fully backed by overwhelming success, and the establishment of an unassailable re-dressing of the vampire archetype.

As the plot inevitably brings characters together, Rice uses an interesting operating metaphor: The meeting of the vampires is like death, a reunion of souls long thought lost forever to one another. Rice implies that such an un-afterlife's akin to being with our lost loved ones (i.e. wishfully her daughter Michele & husband Stan), also complete with physical manifestations of ghosts.

More importantly Prince Lestat again advances vampires by positing a cultural evolution of the collected outsiders accepting themselves for what they are, divorcing what negative terms humanity may have contexted the vampire, and finding contentment in that realization. They begin by confronting that they're not dead, but alive, not damned, but blessed, and to still hold onto the medieval ideas that defined them only keeps them from feeling they deserve to be more than monsters. Granted, this self-forgiveness doesn't mean they're no longer vampires ... and for that sanguine truth -- that the blood is the life -- we are thankful.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.