Blackwood Farm

In her new novel, Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative-her vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches-to give us a world of classic Deep South luxury and ancestral secrets. Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelganger, a spirit known as Goblin, a spirit from the dreamworld that Quinn can't escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelganger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself. As the novel moves backward and forward in time, from Quinn's boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present-day New Orleans, from the ancient Pompeii to nineteenth-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the specter that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds. Like her much beloved novel The Witching Hour, Blackwood Farm is a family saga-capturing both the dramas and the subtleties of family as it tells its story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny. It is Anne Rice at her best. Copyright 2002 by Anne O'Brien Rice. Published by Ballantine Publishing Group.

Hardcover cover image published by Alfred A. Knopf. Front-of-jacket image: Cameo photographed by Geoff Spear. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.