« What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both hea­ven and hell : our doom again and again and again. » –from The Vampire Lestat

Rice once again sum­mons up the irre­sis­tible spi­rit-world of the oldest and most power­ful forces of the night, invi­sible beings unlea­shed on an unsus­pec­ting world able to take blood from humans, in a long-awai­ted return to the extra­or­di­na­ry world of the Vampire Chronicles and the uni­que­ly seduc­tive Queen of the Damned (« mes­me­ri­zing » –San Francisco Chronicle), a long-awai­ted novel that picks up where The Vampire Lestat (« brilliant…its undead cha­rac­ters are utter­ly alive » –New York Times) left off more than a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry ago to create an extra­or­di­na­ry new world of spi­rits and forces–the cha­rac­ters, legend, and lore of all the Vampire Chronicles.

The novel opens with the vam­pire world in crisis…vampires have been pro­li­fe­ra­ting out of control ; bur­nings have com­men­ced all over the world, huge mas­sacres simi­lar to those car­ried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned…Old vam­pires, rou­sed from slum­ber in the earth are doing the bid­ding of a Voice com­man­ding that they indis­cri­mi­na­te­ly burn vam­pire-mave­ricks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco.

As the novel moves from present-day New York and the West Coast to ancient Egypt, fourth cen­tu­ry Carthage, 14^th-cen­tu­ry Rome, the Venice of the Renaissance, the worlds and beings of all the Vampire Chronicles-Louis de Pointe du Lac ; the eter­nal­ly young Armand, whose face is that of a Boticelli angel ; Mekare and Maharet, Pandora and Flavius ; David Talbot, vam­pire and ulti­mate fixer from the secret Talamasca ; and Marius, the true Child of the Millennia ; along with all the other new seduc­tive, super­na­tu­ral crea­tures-come toge­ther in this large, luxu­riant, fier­ce­ly ambi­tious novel to ulti­ma­te­ly rise up and seek out who-or what-the Voice is, and to dis­co­ver the secret of what it desires and why…

And, at the book’s cen­ter, the see­min­gly absent, curious­ly mis­sing hero-wan­de­rer, the dazz­ling, dan­ge­rous rebel-outlaw–the great hope of the Undead, the dazz­ling Prince Lestat…