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. ***The Vampire Chronicles is soon to be a major TV show*** Also in the Vampire Chronicles: The Vampire Lestat The Queen of the Damned

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."

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

'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

***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

Returning to the hypnotic world she so brilliantly created in Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her power to enthrall.  With the same richness of drama, atmosphere and incident, she tells the fantastic story of the vampire Lestat, whom we first perceived as the seductive devil-vampire of Interview with the Vampire and whom we now follow through the ages as he searches for the origin and meaning of his own dark immortality.  And who, more and more, engages our sympathy until he stands revealed as a questing romantic, a vampire-hero with his own strange and passionate courage and morality.

As the novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five years' sleep,  and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of millions.  And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the riddle of his own existence.

As he speaks we are plunged back into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling troupe of actors.  We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first apprentice at a boulevard theater, then its most celebrated actor, idolized, adored by many and--night after night--watched by one . . . until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy, he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally joined to the unholy brotherhood.

We follow Lestat as he searches for others like him--in churches and brothels, in gambling houses, huts and palaces--sometimes joined by the vampire-angel Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty are equally transcendent.  We follow Lestat as he travels from the snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins, sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing always that the central truth eludes him.

But all the while, throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has made enemies among his brethren--vampires who are in terror of his questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to rule.  And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is at last revealed.  Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning climax, Lestat's vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic freeways of the twentieth century.

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.

Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding stoyrtelling, Anne Rice makes real a family of witches--a family given to poetry and incest, to murder and philsophy, a family that is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous and seductive being.
"Unfolds like a poisonous lotus blossom redolent with luxurious evil."
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

"A wonderfully mesmerizing adventure, delving into the convoluted mind of one of modern fiction's most famous anti-heroes, the vampire Lestat. Rice's writing is elegant and thought-provoking and her story is a gem."
THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

For centuries Lestat has been a courted prince in the universe of the dead. Now he is alone and everything he once believed in seems false. So he embarks on a dangerous journey to destroy his doubts and loneliness forever....

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.

"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

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.

"SEDUCTIVE MAGIC...SPELLBINDING...Rice stages her scenes in a wide variety of times and locales, tapping deeply into the richest veins of mythology and history."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"STEAMY...FAST-PACED AND HUGELY ENGROSSING...Rice's title character--a seductive, evil, highly sexual and ultimately tragic creature--is fascinating."
--The Miami Herald
"BEHIND ALL THE VELVET DRAPES AND GOSSAMER WINDING SHEETS, THIS IS AN OLD-FASHIONED FAMILY SAGA....Rice's descriptive writing is so opulent it almost begs to be read by candlelight."
--The Washington Post Book World
"RICE SEES THINGS ON A GRAND SCALE...There is a wide-screen historical sweep to the tale as it moves from one generation of witches to the other."
--The Boston Globe
"EROTIC...EERIE...HORRIFYING...A tight tale of the occult in present-day New Orleans...Anne Rice is a spellbinding novelist.... LASHER quenches."
--Denver Post
A MAIN SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD(c)

“RICE WRITES WITH HER USUAL EROTIC AND HISTORICALLY EVOCATIVE FLAIR.”
–People

Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, Marius is kidnapped and forced into that dark realm of blood, where he is made a protector of the Queen and King of the vampires–in whom the core of the supernatural race resides. Through his eyes we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine, the horrific sack of the Eternal City at the hands of the Visigoths, and the vile aftermath of the Black Death. Ultimately restored by the beauty of the Renaissance, Marius becomes a painter, living dangerously yet happily among mortals, and giving his heart to the great master Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the mysterious young apprentice Armand. But it is in the present day, deep in the jungle, when Marius will meet his fate seeking justice from the oldest vampires in the world. . . .

"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

Before E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day's Bared to You, there was Anne Rice's New York Times best seller The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty In the traditional folktale of "Sleeping Beauty," the spell cast upon the lovely young princess and everyone in her castle can only be broken by the kiss of a Prince. It is an ancient story, one that originally emerged from and still deeply disturbs the mind's unconscious. In the first book of the series, Anne Rice (author of Beauty's Kingdom), writing as A.N. Roquelaure, retells the Beauty story and probes the unspoken implications of this lush, suggestive tale by exploring its undeniable connection to sexual desire. Here the Prince awakens Beauty, not with a kiss, but with sexual initiation. His reward for ending the hundred years of enchantment is Beauty's complete and total enslavement to him . . . as Anne Rice explores the world of erotic yearning and fantasy in a classic that becomes, with her skillful pen, a compelling experience. Readers of Fifty Shades of Grey will indulge in Rice's deft storytelling and imaginative eroticism, a sure-to-be classic for years to come. "Articulate, baroque, and fashionably pornographic." -Playboy"Something very special . . . at once so light and yet so haunting." -The Advocate

"[A] huge and sprawling tale of horror."
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of four centuries of witches--a family given to poetry and incest, murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being called Lasher who haunts the Mayfair women..
Moving in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and the France of Louis XIV, from the coffee plantations of Port-au-Prince to Civil War New Orleans and back to today, Anne Rice has spun a mesmerizing tale that challenges everything we believe in.

In the grand manner of Interview with the vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation.

Fear Dat New Orleans explores the eccentric and often macabre dark corners of America's most unique city. In addition to detailed histories of bizarre burials, ghastly murders, and the greatest concentration of haunted places in America, Fear Dat features a "bone watcher's guide" with useful directions of who's buried where, from Marie Laveau to Ruthie the Duck Girl. You'll also find where to buy the most authentic gris-gris or to get the best psychic reading. The Huffington Post tagged Michael Murphy's first book Eat Dat, about the city's food culture, the #1 "essential" book to read before coming to New Orleans. New Orleans Living called it "both reverent and irreverent, he manages to bring a sense of humor to serious eating-and that's what New Orleans is all about." In Fear Dat, Murphy brings similar insights and irreverence to New Orleans voodoo, vampires, graveyards, and ghosts.