From #1 New York Times bestselling author Anne Rice, this sensuously written spellbinding classic remains 'the most successful vampire story since Bram Stoker's Dracula' (The Times).

In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood.

When Interview with the Vampire was published the Washington Post said it was a 'thrilling, strikingly original work of the imagination . . . sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, always unforgettable'.

Now, more than forty years since its release, Anne Rice's masterpiece is more beloved than ever.

On the verandah of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking. And the witching hour begins...Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches - a family give4n to poetry and incest, to murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being. A hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult across four centuries, The Witching Hour could only have been written by the spellbinding bestselling author of The Vampire Chronicles.

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force-a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write.
Praise for "Interview with the Vampire"
"A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth-the education of the vampire."--"Chicago Tribune"
"Unrelentingly erotic . . . sometimes beautiful, and always unforgettable."--"Washington Post"
"If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream."--"Boston Globe"
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"A chilling, thought-provoking tale, beautifully frightening, sensuous, and utterly unnerving."--"Hartford Courant"

"From the Paperback edition."

***The Vampire Chronicles is soon to be a major TV show*** After 6,000 years of horrifying stillness, Akasha, mother of all vampires and Queen of the Damned, has risen from her sleep to let loose the powers of the night. But her monstrous plan for ruling the worlds of the living and the undead must be stopped before she destroys mankind, and it falls to the vampire Lestat to fight her all-encompassing evil - for it is he who challenged her power by waking her from sleep. Also in the Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire The Vampire Lestat The Queen of the Damned

In 1976, a uniquely seductive world of vampires was unveiled in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire . . . in 1985, a wild and voluptous voice spoke to us, telling the story of The Vampire Lestat.  In The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice continues her extraordinary "Vampire Chronicles" in a feat of mesmeric storytelling, a chillingly hypnotic entertainment in which the oldest and most powerful forces of the night are unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Three brilliantly colored narrative threads intertwine as the story unfolds:

- The rock star known as Vampire Lestat, worshipped by millions of spellbound fans, prepares for a concert in San Francisco.  Among the audience--pilgrims in a blind swoon of adoration--are hundreds of vampires, creatures who see Lestat as a "greedy fiend risking the secret prosperity of all his kind just to be loved and seen by mortals," fiends themselves who hate Lestat's power and who are determined to destroy him . . .

- The sleep of certain men and women--vampires and mortals scattered around the world--is haunted by a vivid, mysterious dream: of twins with fiery red hair and piercing green eyes who suffer an unspeakable tragedy.  It is a dream that slowly, tauntingly reveals its meaning to the dreamers as they make their way toward each other--some to be destroyed on the journey, some to face an even more terrifying fate at journey's end . . .

- Akasha--Queen of the Damned, mother of all vampires, rises after a 6,000 year sleep and puts into motion a heinous plan to "save" mankind from itself and make "all myths of the world real" by elevating herself and her chosen son/lover to the level of the gods: "I am the fulfillment and I shall from this moment be the cause" . . .

These narrative threads wind sinuously across a vast, richly detailed tapestry of the violent, sensual world of vampirism, taking us back 6,000 years to its beginnings.  As the stories of the "first brood" of blood drinkers are revealed, we are swept across the ages, from Egypt to South America to the Himalayas to all the shrouded corners of the globe where vampires have left their mark. Vampires are created--mortals succumbing to the sensation of "being enptied, of being devoured, of being nothing." Vampires are destroyed.  Dark rituals are performed--the rituals of ancient creatures prowling the modern world.  And, finally, we are brought to a moment in the twentieth century when, in an astonishing climax, the fate of the living dead--and perhaps of the living, all the living--will be decided.


From the Hardcover edition.

Before E. L. James and Sylvia Day, there was Anne Rice: Discover Beauty's Kingdom, the fourth novel in the bestselling Sleeping Beauty series Mega-bestselling author Anne Rice, writing as A. N. Roquelaure, returns to the mysterious kingdom of Queen Eleanor in this new chapter of her Sleeping Beauty series. When the great queen is reported dead, Beauty and Laurent return to the kingdom they left twenty years before. Beauty agrees to take the throne, but she insists that all erotic servitude be voluntary. Countless eager princes, princesses, lords, ladies, and commoners journey to Beauty's realm, where she and her husband usher in a new era of desire, longing, and ecstasy. Provocative and stirring, Rice's imaginative retelling of the Sleeping Beauty myth will be adored by her longtime fans and new readers of erotica just discovering the novels. This book is intended for mature audiences.

FROM INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND 'QUEEN OF THE UNDEAD', ANNE RICE

The Vampire Chronicles continue with a riveting, rich saga – part adventure, part fairy tale – of Prince Lestat and the story of how he came to rule the vampire world

From his ancestral chateau high up in the mountains of France, Prince Lestat grapples to instil a new ideology of peace and harmony among the blood-drinking community.

Accustomed to welcoming the Undead from far and wide, one night he awakes to news of a ruthless attack by a group of maverick vampires.

After fleeing to investigate the terror, Lestat learns of several new enemies who are intent on disrupting the harmony he tries so hard to maintain. But is Lestat strong enough to take on such evil alone or will sacrifices have to be made?

Will his cry for peace be heard in a world riddled with violence?

Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now Lestat is a rockstar in the demonic, shimmering 1980s. He rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his terrifying exsitence. His story, the second volume in Anne Rice's best-selling Vampire Chronicles, is mesmerizing, passionate, and thrilling.
"Frightening, sensual."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

'Ah, the taste and feel of blood when all passion and greed is sharpened in that one desire!' Lestat: a vampire - but very much not the conventional undead, for Lestat is the truly alive. Lestat is vivid, ecstatic, stagestruck, and in his extravagant story he plunges from the lasciviousness of eighteenth-century Paris to the demonic Egypt of prehistory; from fin-de-siecle New Orleans to the frenetic twentieth-century world of rock superstardom - as, pursued by the living and the dead, he searches across time for the secret of his own dark immortality. ***Soon to be a major TV show*** Also in the Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire The Vampire Lestat The Queen of the Damned

In this mesmerizing new novel, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magic, as she weaves together two of her most compelling worlds? those of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair witches.

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly erotic, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force--a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.
It is a novel only Anne Rice could write....
"Magnificent, compulsively readable."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SHOW, FROM THE NETWORK BEHIND THE WALKING DEAD '[W]hen I found Rice's work I absolutely loved how she took that genre and (...) made [it] feel so contemporary and relevant' Sarah Pinborough, bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes '[Rice wrote] in the great tradition of the gothic' Ramsey Campbell, bestselling author of The Hungry Moon After a 15 year wait LESTAT is back in Anne Rice's long awaited new Vampire Chronicles novel. The vampire world is in crisis - their kind have been proliferating out of control and, thanks to technologies undreamed of in previous centuries, they can communicate as never before. Roused from their earth-bound slumber, ancient ones are in thrall to the Voice, which commands that they burn fledgling vampires in cities from Paris to Mumbai, Hong Kong to Kyoto and San Francisco. Immolations, huge massacres, have commenced all over the world. Who - or what - is the Voice? What does it desire, and why? There is only one vampire, only one blood drinker, truly known to the entire world of the Undead. Will the dazzling hero-wanderer, the dangerous rebel-outlaw Lestat heed the call to unite the Children of Darkness as they face this new twilight? Anne Rice's epic, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious new novel brings together all the worlds and beings of the legendary Vampire Chronicles, from present-day New York and Ancient Egypt to fourth-century Carthage and Renaissance Venice; from Louis de Pointe du Lac; Armand the eternally young; Mekare and Maharet; to Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the Secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true child of the Millennia. It also introduces many other seductive supernatural creatures, and heralds significant new blood.

Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now Lestat is a rockstar in the demonic, shimmering 1980s. He rushes through the centuries in search of others like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his terrifying exsitence. His story, the second volume in Anne Rice's best-selling Vampire Chronicles, is mesmerizing, passionate, and thrilling.
"Frightening, sensual."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE


From the Paperback edition.

"A welcome chance to catch up with old friends...Fascinating...When we emerge from its folds, there's good news on the last page: 'The chronicle of the vampires will continue.' Yum."
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
A feat of mesmerizing storytelling, a chilling entertainment, THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED unleashes Akasha, the Queen herself, who has risen from a six-thousand year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to "save" mankind and destroy Lestat--in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead.

'[W]hen I found Rice's work I absolutely loved how she took that genre and (...) made [it] feel so contemporary and relevant' Sarah Pinborough, bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes '[Rice wrote] in the great tradition of the gothic' Ramsey Campbell, bestselling author of The Hungry Moon Herod Antipas rules Galilee, Pontius Pilate is the new Roman governor of Judea, and the Roman Empire rules the world. These are turbulent times for Israel, a troubled land of turmoil and insurrection. Now in his thirtieth year, Jesus and his tight-knit family endure a long, dusty winter of disruption and chaos. Whispers of his virgin birth still persist, and while he struggles with the demands of his family and the weight of his great destiny, those around him wait for some sign of the path he will take. But this quiet man of Nazareth is instead called upon to found a ministry which will utterly transform an unsuspecting world ...

SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SHOW, FROM THE NETWORK BEHIND THE WALKING DEAD '[W]hen I found Rice's work I absolutely loved how she took that genre and (...) made [it] feel so contemporary and relevant' Sarah Pinborough, bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes '[Rice wrote] in the great tradition of the gothic' Ramsey Campbell, bestselling author of The Hungry Moon "In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands. I saw flames that outshone the lamps of heaven. And all the world was shaken..." Lestat de Lioncourt is no longer alone. A strange, otherworldly spirit has resurfaced, taking possession of his body and soul. All-seeing, all-knowing, its voice whispers in his ear, telling the hypnotic tale of Atlantis, the great sea power of ancient times... Prince Lestat is seduced by the power of this ancient spirit, but is he right to trust it? Why has Lestat, leader of the vampires, been chosen as its bodily host? And what of Atlantis, the mysterious heaven on earth? Why must the vampires reckon so many millennia later with the terrifying force of this ageless, all-powerful Atalantaya spirit? It falls to Lestat to discover the truth. 'There's little doubt about the paperback that will be selling like hotcakes this month. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles saga continues.' - SFX 'Linguistically masterful, structurally solid and weaved like a gossamer web of nightwalker excellence. Anne Rice further solidifies her undisputed reputation for penning novels of dark poetry, where Lestat lives and breathes in all his benevolence. Pompous, preening, princely and beyond earthly reproach. For the uninitiated and experienced traveller alike this continuation of The Vampire Chronicles makes a mockery of any shared cinematic universe you can name.' - Flickering Myth 'Anne Rice's prose has always been lyrical and poetic, the words ebbing and flowing from page to page, calmly and rhythmically. In this latest edition, she proposes some ethical and spiritual quandaries from both sides of the sets of characters.' - On: Magazine

The delicious and erotically charged sequel to The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, from the author of Beauty's Kingdom. This sequel to The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, the first of Anne Rice's (writing as A.N. Roquelaure) elegantly written volumes of erotica, continues her explicit, teasing exploration of the psychology of human desire. Now Beauty, having indulged in a secret and forbidden infatuation with the rebellious slave Prince Tristan, is sent away from the Satyricon-like world of the Castle. Sold at auction, she will soon experience the tantalizing punishments of "the village," as her education in love, cruelty, dominance, submission, and tenderness is turned over to the brazenly handsome Captain of the Guard. And once again Rice's fabulous tale of pleasure and pain dares to explore the most primal and well-hidden desires of the human heart. Preceding the visceral eroticism of E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day's Bared to You, and even more haunting than her own novel Belinda, this second installment in the Sleeping Beauty series is not to be missed.

In 2005, Anne Rice startled her readers with her novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," and by revealing that, after years as an atheist, she had returned to her Catholic faith."
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana" followed.
And now, in her powerful and haunting memoir, Rice tells the story of the spiritual transformation that produced a complete change in her literary goals.
She begins with her girlhood in New Orleans as the devout child in a deeply religious Irish Catholic family. She describes how, as she grew up, she lost her belief in God, but not her desire for a meaningful life.
She writes about her years in radical Berkeley, where her career as a novelist began with the publication of "Interview with the Vampire," soon to be followed by more novels about otherworldly beings, about the realms of good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual, each reflecting aspects of her often agonizing moral quest.
She writes about loss and tragedy (her mother's drinking; the death of her daughter and, later, her beloved husband, Stan Rice); about new joys; about the birth of her son, Christopher; about the family's return in 1988 to the city of New Orleans, the city that inspired so much of her work. She tells how after an adult lifetime of questioning, she experienced the intense conversion and consecration to Christ that lie behind her most recent novels.
For her readers old and new, this book explores her continuing interior pilgrimage.

"From the Hardcover edition."

"STARTLING . . . FIENDISH . . . MEMNOCH'S TALE IS COMPELLING."
--New York Daily News

"Like Interview with the Vampire, Memnoch has a half-maddened, fever-pitch intensity. . . . Narrated by Rice's most cherished character, the vampire Lestat, Memnoch tells a tale as old as Scripture's legends and as modern as today's religious strife."
--Rolling Stone

"SENSUAL . . . BOLD, FAST-PACED."
--USA Today

"Rice has penned an ambitious close to this long-running series. . . . Fans will no doubt devour this."
--The Washington Post Book World

"MEMNOCH THE DEVIL OFFERS PASSAGES OF POETIC BRILLIANCE."
--Playboy

"[MEMNOCH] is one of Rice's most intriguing and sympathetic characters to date. . . . Rice ups the ante, taking Lestat where few writers have ventured: into heaven and hell itself. She carries it off in top form."
--The Seattle Times

In her new novel, perennial bestseller Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative -- her Vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches -- to give us a world of classic deep-south luxury and ancestral secrets.

Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelgänger, “Goblin,” a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can’t escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelgänger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself.

As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn’s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds.

A story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny, Blackwood Farm is Anne Rice at her mesmerizing best.


From the Hardcover edition.

An erotic novel of discipline, love and surrender from master storyteller Anne Rice. In the traditional fairy tale of 'Sleeping Beauty' the spell cast upon the lovely young princess can only be broken by the kiss of a prince. However, in the world of Anne Rice, this legendary curse is broken not with a kiss, but with sexual initiation. The Prince's reward for ending the hundred years of enchantment is Beauty's complete and total enslavement to him. Sleeping Beauty awakes to a world of seduction, desire and love. In the first of a three part retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, Anne Rice explores the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive fairy tale, opening up a world of erotic yearning and fantasy which is perfect for fans of Fifty Shades of Grey. This is the first of Anne Rice's classic Sleeping Beauty trilogy.

The time is now.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . .

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . .

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire--all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child--and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death--a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below . . .

We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be . . .

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires--the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . .

In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order.

"ANNE RICE WILL LIVE ON THROUGH THE AGES OF LITERATURE."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"TALTOS IS THE THIRD BOOK IN A SERIES KNOWN AS THE LIVES OF THE MAYFAIR WITCHES . . . Their haunted heritage has brought the family great wealth, which is exercised from a New Orleans manse with Southern gentility; but of course such power cannot escape notice . . . or challenge. . . Rice is a formidable talent. . .
[Taltos] is a curious amalgam of gothic, glamour fiction, alternate history, and high soap opera."
--The Washington Post Book World
"AN INTRICATE, STUNNING IMAGINATION."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"SPELLBINDING . . . MYTHICAL . . . Anne Rice is a pure storyteller."
--Cosmopolitan
"BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"Her power of invention seems boundless. . . . She has made a masterpiece of the morbid, worthy of Poe's daughter. . . . It is hard to praise sufficiently the originality of Miss Rice."
--The Wall Street Journal