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+. 

my digital migration.

After the double collapse of ImGoth, and the recent closure of Darklinks, I find myself re-building my datacastle at G+. While it lacks the dark focus & subcultural fostering of my previous cyberhomes, there's a large subset of Gothic community on here, plus a greater pool of the scene's past & present Gotherati, along with non-scene people whom I know & love from my life in Tucson. In migrating here I'm going to re-post a fair amount of photos, and more importantly, writing. For those of you who've followed me on either of those previous sites you'll immediately recognize the content, and for my new circles a bunch of blox in your feed ranging from the painfully confessional, reviews of literature & cinema, episodic life commentary, pensive essays, bits of fiction, old polls, and seriously over-passionate fanboy subject surveys. Honestly it's years of stuff, so I'm also writing this as a coming-your-way-heads-up in case the cross-posting from Blogger doesn't retro-date the shares to G+ back to when it was originally penned in the stream of things, and you find yourself asking, "Why is he just now reviewing this 20-year-old film?", or other equally anachronistic observations. Odds are I'm keeping it in my writer's portfolio as a showpiece, so bear with me.

Maybe it's just first impressions of G+, but there's something obtuse about how this social network's set up: indirectness of messaging, the presentation of another's feed over their own profile's about, the small and nearly unidentifiable roundel for initial identification, the aggregation of postings over the proactive visitation of profiles, and the one-sided classification system of placing others into groups they (and likewise you) will never be aware of, thus shunting the complication/simplicity of honesty aside to never truly know where you stand with people, and the near-infinite amount of sharing over folks actually bothering to take their own photos or write their own material. And even if it were one's own material you took time to work on, you lose ownership in a sense, as it becomes secondarily attributed -- they're just chunklets of infotaining data floating in an amorphous pool, a pool which dilutes authorship. And while one can restrict sharing to prevent this, unless you've accrued 1M+ followers, your tree falls in the forest for no one to hear.

Yet what's also stunning are the 4.5K+ views I've gotten in under one month. On those previous niche sites it'd've taken me years to accrue that many hits. And while that observation sounds like it's about ego, it's not -- it's about connectivity and the opportunity that arises when the doors it can knock upon multiplies exponentially.

Ultimately I'm hanging my black hat here for stability. Google's not going anywhere except into the far future. It pwns the internet aggregation game, acquired YouTube, figured out more effective online video conferencing, has bottomless pockets, and gave visionary Ray Kurzweil a carte blanche lab to engineer immortality for us (+1 that!). Such quests for innovation & permanence (hopefully) means that this is the last time I cut 'n' paste my long-accrued virtuality from one screen to another and can instead spend my time on more creative endeavours for you before eventually tagging it into an uploaded version of my wholly conscious cerebral singularity matrix.

Welcome to Guillermo the IVth, v.3.0.

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+.