Memnoch The Devil

Anne Rice’s Memnoch The Devil again has her favorite vampire Lestat front and center.  Lestat is in the process of tracking a victim when he senses that he himself is being followed.  It’s the devil (“call me Memnoch”) who proposes that Lestat join him and become a sort of assistant.  Memnoch explains that he is an angel who can come and go from Heaven as he chooses, but because he questioned God’s plan he has been tasked with operating hell, which is a sort of purgatory where Memnoch attempts to usher lost souls into Heaven.  Memnoch takes Lestat to heaven and then back in time to the beginning of creation and throughout history, including to the scene of Christ’s crucifixon, in order to show Lestat why he questioned God and why Lestat should join him to oppose God.  There’s some other stuff in there about the evangelist daughter of Lestat’s victim - a woman who Lestat falls for, and appearances from some other vampires, including Armand and David Talbot.  And well . . .

I have to confess – I did not enjoy this book.

This is the fifth book in Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles series and if I was ranking them 1-5, they would go in chronological order, meaning that each has been worse than the previous installment (as I’ve previously written, Interview with the Vampire is one of my favorite books).  And the last two were significantly worse than the first three.


I could go into what was good, what was bad, etc., but it’s probably not worth my time to write or yours to read.  There’s some interesting stuff here, in particular the detailed descriptions of Rice’s version of Heaven and Hell.  But ultimately the vast majority of the book is just Memnoch explaining Heaven and creation and God and everything to Lestat, which was just tedious.  It felt like Anne had all these ideas and thoughts and just wanted to get them in writing.  She’s seems to be trying to reconcile her ideas of Heaven and thought "why not make this into a book . . . and I’ll include the vampires for no reason."  Seriously, this could have been a stand-alone book without Lestat and it wouldn’t have made a difference.  I don’t begrudge her writing that book if she wants to, but I also don’t need to like that book.  I’ll probably continue on with the series, and I hope book six is much better (and I think it could be since it appears to follow Armand’s origins, something new and not directly involving Lestat.)

Next up:  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (1006 pages done – thanks two week vacation)