Pandora
This novel marks the begining of a new series of vampire novels, linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead.
The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded cafe', where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life.
Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Ceasar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love w/ the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Anticoch, where she is destined to be reunited w/ Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.
Vittorio, The Vampire
W/ Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold.
Educated in the Florence of Coisimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio in habits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures-a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power.
In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue.
Against a backdrop of the wonders-both sacred and profane-and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.
Merrick
Here, in a magnificent tale of sorcery and the occult she makes real for us a hitherto unexplored world of witchcraft.
At the center is the beautiful, unconquerable witch Merrick. She is a descendant of the gens de couleur libres, a society of New Orleans octoroons and quadroons steeped in the lore and ceremony of voodoo, who reigned in the shadowy world where African and French-the dark and the white-intermingled. Her ancestors are the great Mayfair Witches, of whom she knows nothing-and from who she inherits the power and the magical knowledge of a Circe.
Into this exotic realm comes David Talbot-hero, storyteller, adventurer, almost mortal vampire, visitor from another dark relam. It is he who recounts Merrick's haunting tale-a tale that takes us from the New Orleans of past and present to the jumgles of Guatemala, from the Maya ruins of a centurey ago to ancient civilizations not yet explored.
Anne Rice's richly told novel weaves an irresistible story of two worlds: the witches' world and the vampires'world, where magical powers and otherwordly fascinations are locked together in a dance of seduction, death and rebirth.
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