Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles changed the world of vampire fiction and are responsible for so much of the way the genre is today. You can see Rice’s influence in everything from Twilight to True Blood to The Vampire Diaries. Knowing this, I picked up Rice’s books quite early, reading Interview with the Vampire during my initial bloodsucker craze when I was probably about thirteen. Taken together, the first three books—Interview, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned—have been canonized as timeless classics that are essential reading for anyone who loves these creatures of the night. But as many fans would agree, after Queen of the Damned the books begin to get … weird. I pushed through for a couple more books, but after Lestat embarked on a Dantesque voyage through heaven and hell and back in time to witness the Crucifixion during Memnoch the Devil, I decided I was done and abandoned the series for half a decade. This year, however, I decided to try picking back up where I left off with The Vampire Armand.
With this book, we return to the Interview style with a new point-of-view character chronicling his life story from before he was turned to the present. That character is Armand—the beautiful, eternally youthful former leader of the Théâtres des Vampires. Armand begins his tale with the moment he was kidnapped by slave traders. Born outside the ruined city of Kiev in the fifteenth century, Armand was a talented icon painter who was destined to join the monks in the Monastery of the Caves. One night, however, Armand is captured and sold to the ancient vampire Marius. Marius raises him along with a pack of other young boys in the colorful city of Venice. Most of the book is spent on this exciting and blissful period, focusing on Armand’s special relationship with Marius and the events that led up to becoming a vampire. Then Armand is taken out of paradise when Santino attacks Marius’s compound and compels Armand to join his Children of Darkness and their Satanic mission. Armand explains how he came to be leader of the coven at Théâtres des Vampires and then companion to Louis after his coven was destroyed, but he glosses over the action that has already been covered in the earlier books. In the final chapters, Armand describes his reaction when Lestat returned from his adventures with Memnoch bearing Veronica’s Veil and how he came to form a close bond with two mortals, Sybelle and Benji.
The Vampire Armand was actually the perfect place to pick back up after a long break. A new narrating character means that this book is essentially a fresh start, and since much of the action takes place before Lestat and Louis are even born, it can stand somewhat independently. While you’ll still want to have read at least the first three books for background, you don’t need to remember every plot detail that happened earlier in the series, and what you do need to know from Memnoch, it helpfully recaps.
This book was also a breath of fresh air after Memnoch the Devil, though in certain parts it does continue a bit of the complex theology and heavy moralizing that made me put Memnoch down. Personally, I’m just not that interested in the Gospel According to Anne Rice. Now, Armand is a very religious character, who was profoundly affected when he saw Jesus’s face imprinted on the veil that Lestat brought back in the previous book, so of course religious discourse would have to come up. Throughout The Vampire Armand, he has several different religious epiphanies and ecstatic visions. But while these scenes are important for understanding Armand’s character, I care far more about Armand’s relationships with others than his relationship with God. For this reason, my favorite parts of the book were the early descriptions of his childhood with Marius and the very end when he meets Sybelle and Benji.
Of course, these interpersonal relationships have their own distasteful elements, as they so often do in Rice’s fiction. Primarily, we have the ethically questionable sexual relationship between the ancient vampire Marius and the pubescent (and recently abused) Armand. And when Marius sends Armand out to experience “true manhood,” Armand seems to learn everything there is to know about sex except for consent. But the sexual politics of Anne Rice’s novels could fill a whole blog post on their own.
Suffice it to say that The Vampire Armand was much closer to what I liked about the first three books than Body Thief or Memnoch were, but it still doesn’t quite live up to their legacy. If you’d like to read it and judge for yourself, you can find The Vampire Armand at your local retailer or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process by clicking this Bookshop.org affiliate link.