New Perspectives

I am one of the few people of my acquaintance who loves Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice.

My husband hates it because he feels Anne Rice jumped the shark when writing The Vampire Lestat. He finds Queen of the Damned disjointed and poorly written. Others just think Anne Rice is overly hyped and best read by teenagers who do not know any better.

I can accept the teenager crack. It's probably a valid reaction. I know I quit reading them in college and when (spoiler) Anne wouldn't let Louis die. I threw that book across the room. Anyway...

I love Queen of the Damned. Yes, it does jump from plot line to plot line. But this is something any reader of George R. R. Martin has experienced in his Song of Ice and Fire series. I like this structure. It almost teases the reader and keeps them reading and reading to get to the plot line that really has the reader hooked. This doesn't outshine my real reason for loving this book. I love how Anne explains the reason vampires exist. To me, this is enough to make me love this book. Rice took an old myth, one that exists in every culture, and tells us why those myths exist.

I've read other books that do this, explain some fictional thing into existance. Memnoch the Devil, also by Anne Rice, does this too in a slightly different way. Lucifer approaches Lestat, looking to make an agreement with the Vampire Prince. While this book doesn't explain anything, it does present another face to Lucifer. In some ways, humanizing the Morningstar, making the reader see him in other way. Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty did similar things in film. God needs a vacation in Bruce Almighty and Steve Carell has his own Noah experience in Evan Almighty.

It's interesting to look at things in a different way, in a different angle. As children, we play with prisms and lenses. We're fascinated by these. Books can do the same thing for adults. And I love those books for the altered thinking I experience between their covers.