by TheBaxter on Mon Nov 05, 2018 1:36 am
finished reading Blood Communion, the latest and shittiest Anne Rice vampire chronicles book. the previous 2 books were pretty shitty, but i think this one has them beat.... which is saying a lot considering how bad those last two were. at least those books had some kind of coherent story to tell. this book starts off a jumbled mess, Rice seems to have no idea who she wants to be the villain of this particular book so she introduces a few possibilities, before finally settling on one about halfway through the book... leading to the only good part of the book, a way-too-brief section where a thing actually happens. once that thing happens, the book quickly returns to being an empty void of nothingness. seriously, the last 50 pages are so are devoted to a dance ball--a fucking DANCE BALL--which Lestat spends the entire time brooding over some grand personal revelation that, when finally revealed, has all the emotional Punky Power of a Sally Field oscar speech. that's 50 pages of an approximately 250-page book padded out with that shit (about the only positive thing i can say about this book is that at least it's short).
when Rice started writing Lestat books again, she gave some interview where she said the hardest thing about writing these new books is that she had so many ideas, it was hard to choose which ones to write about. if this book is any indication, she solved that problem by choosing not to write about any of them. though maybe that's better than writing about a really dumb idea, like she chose to do in her last book.
i've really disliked all 3 of these new Lestat books, and while a lot of that is due to the subpar writing, lack of originality, and just plain stupid crap that happens in these newer books, i realized by the end of this one another huge reason why these books just don't work for me. the original Vampire Chronicles books were all about the loneliness and isolation and alienation felt by these vampires, a heightened metaphor for the kind of alienation so many people feel. i read those books in high school, the time in most people's lives when those feelings of loneliness and alienation are at their height, so i could really identify with those characters. but in these new books, Rice is obsessed with the idea of her vampire "tribe" coming together and becoming a shiny happy family of bloodsuckers. this most recent book is the ultimate culmination of that effort, and it's incredibly dissatisfying. i don't want to read about happy vampires socializing and repeatedly telling each other they love them. i get that the whole miserable, self-pitying vampire thing has probably been done to death by now, but this is not a good substitute. vampires are supposed to be solitary creatures, not a bunch of fucking jaycees. at this rate, the next VC book is going to be 300 pages of Lestat worrying about what to make for the potluck dinner at next week's meeting of the vampire book club.
so yeah... this book really su-- er, stank.
couple other notes:
-- there are way too many fucking vampire characters in these books now. and the new ones are not nearly as interesting as the old ones.
-- the "replimoids", "atlanteans" and other silly fantasy-sci-fi characters introduced in the last book are still around. basically they're just background characters, but they still exist as a reminder of just how much Rice has fucked up her original vampire mythology with all that crap.
-- please make it stop.
