What I like most about Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles so far is her committment to retooling Vampire mythologies for the twentieth century without turning them into crass marketable potboilers (or indeed frustrating anti-feminist Mills & Boon romances for teenagers. Given her own referencing within the book I imagine that Rice would see her novels as spawning from the great Vampire classics Polidori, Varney, Carmilla and Dracula but for the first time the Vampire isn't the sexual threat in the shadows, that which is unknowable and thinkable (yet desired) so called deviant sexualities are embraced and explored. I can't think of any pre Rice Vampire tale told completely from the viewpoint of the Vampire, though there are probably a bunch of short stories that prove me wrong.

I was hoping for a page turning potboiler when I picked this up, I confess, and it wasn't until I progressed towards the end that I realised that Rice's vision was really quite interesting, multilayered and very clever. This sequel to Interview With the Vampire works particularly well as a contrast to it with the character portrayed as "evil" (in some respects) in that novel going to great lengths to justify his behaviour and to assert the truth of his own tale above that of Louis'. In some respects as the older more experienced Vampire he is successful. Clearly age and antiquity is important to Lestat since as his tale unfolds the novel becomes a series of tales within a tale; Lestat tells stories about the Vampire's history as told by Armand and Marius and ultimately the tale of how he falls for the Queen of Darkness, the mother of Vampires herself. Of course, we've only got Lestat's word that any of this is true - he's in respects a reliable narrator - and so what we end up is an account of vampire mythology that compares and contrasts with Louis'

The neat trick is how the tales take in different concepts of art and artistry (although this could have been expanded upon)and the way that Lestat's story is booke nded by a modern tale of Lestat retooling himself as a Rock legend (where before the man he loved was a performing violinist, consumed by his passion(. Our identites are bound up in the way we view culture and art and it's Lestat's obsession this art that ultimately consumes him too and leads him to essentially drive the Vampires into a war with humans, whilst also mocking the fact that mortals are so obsessed with image and Vampire identity that they can't even tell the difference between the artistic image and the vampire.

Rice is not a "great" author. Her writing can be clunky and laboured and there are many times when the novel drags. Incidents could be more poignant, revelations bigger, moments of characterisation better defined. Yet her work is by no means trash either and these books reward the time that you might spend with them. Her liberal atheistic outlook is also another draw which makes them all the more satisfying to me.