Anne Rice

Servant Of The Bones is a novel from Anne Rice written during the mid-nineties. Having written extensively about vampires, mummies and witches, the story introduces another supernatural creature – the Genie.

Azriel is the son of a Jewish merchant in ancient Babylon. Living amid the opulence and splendour of the court there, he starts to see the Babylonian god Marduk. When the members of the court realise this though, they conspire to use Azriel to invoke a centuries-old enchantment – they drug him up and involve him in a ceremony to welcome the conquering Persian, Cyrus (no relation to Billie Ray). When the ceremony is over, Azriel is numb and knows he is dying. However, he is brought to another place where his body is placed in a caldron of boiling gold. As the pain overcomes him, he has an out of body experience and his spirit floats above the cauldron as his body dies and is boiled down to the bones.

Oh Lestat, what have you done now? At the end of The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice's beloved Brat Prince has incurred the wrath of vampires across the globe and somehow managed to awaken the vampire Akasha from a slumber of a few thousand years. And such is her fascination with the fanged Frenchman that she grants herself a quickie divorce from her 6,000 year old husband, Enkil. By bleeding him dry (in a vampiric sense - lawyers would have only slowed things down).

Anyhow, having read quite a number of Anne Rice's vampire chronicles, I'm inclined to say that The Queen Of The Damned is one of the best. For a start, it's not totally devoted to Lestat. We finally get a chance to look around at other vampires and see the colour and variation of their characters.

It's a joy, for instance, to see Marius spurned by the ancient vampire he's protected for a couple of thousand years. To see Marius's assumptions shattered and the utter disdain of Akasha for him. And his resulting bitterness is something you never expect to see from one of the most self-assured immortals in Rice's savage garden.