Blood and Gold by Anne Rice
I enjoyed this book, except for the subplot about the Norse vampire, Thorne, at the beginning and end. This frame story had a lot of promise but ended up making little sense to me. I think maybe it alludes to Norse myth, which has never been my forte. Whatever the reason, it left me scratching my head.
But at least it gets Marius telling his life story, and perhaps because the “interviewer” is a stranger, he feels comfortable opening up about all sorts of things. In the words of Alanis Morissette, it’s “strangely exciting, to watch the stoic squirm.” Yes, at times Marius’s story seems really familiar, since most of the major plot events have been told already in The Vampire Lestat, Pandora, and The Vampire Armand.
But now we know just how broken-up Marius was about some of the tragedies in his “life”. We find out how much he loved Pandora, and how much he had to lean on a certain other vampire (I’ll avoid the spoiler) after Santino burned him. I especially love the fact that his recollection of his brief reunion with Pandora is so very different from Pandora’s version. Pandora says the Indian vamp was a jerk and that she didn’t love him; Marius believes the two were codependent as heck. And Marius breaks someone else’s heart that night as well. Even the letter, lost for fifty years, is different between the two books.
In short, this is a pretty good book. You may feel like you’ve read all this stuff before, but if you pay close attention, you’ll get to see the other side of the cool, logical Marius.
The Vampire Chronicles — (1976- ) Publisher: Witness the confessions of a vampire. A novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force, it is a story of danger and flight, love and loss, suspense and resolution, and the extraordinary power of the senses.
New Tales of the Vampires — (1998-1999) Publisher: Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches and the amazing worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a new series of 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 café, 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 France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with 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 Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with 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.
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