Title Servant of the Bones Series --- Author Anne Rice Cover Art --- Publisher Ballantine - 1996 First Printing Ballantine - 1996 Category Horror Warnings None Main Characters Azriel, Jonathan, Gregory Belkin Main Elements Spirits/Demons

Having created fantastic universes of vampires and witches, the incomparable Anne Rice now carries us into new realms of the mystical and the magical --- and into the presence of a dark and luminous new hero: the powerful, witty, smiling Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is a ghost, demon, angel --- in love with the good, in thrall to evil. He pours out his heart to us, telling his astonishing story when he finds himself --- in present-day New York City --- a dazed witness to the murder of a young girl and inexplicably obsessed by the desire to avenge her.

Azriel takes us back to his mortal youth in the magnificent city of Babylon, where he is plucked from death by evil priests and sorceresses and transformed into a genii commanded to do their bidding. Challenging these forces of destruction, Azriel embarks on his perilous journeys through time --- from Babylon's hanging gardens to the Europe of the Black Death to Manhattan in the 1990s. And as his quest approaches its climatic horror, he dares use and risk his supernatural powers in the hope of forestalling a world-threatening conspiracy, and redeeming, at last, what was denied him so long ago: his own eternal human soul.

I officially ran out of Vampire Chronicles to read this year! So I picked up another of Rice's works, Servant of the Bones. I was prepared for this one to be scary or disturbing, kind of like the Mayfair Witches can be, but in the end I found myself oddly unmoved by this tale. I thought I loved reading anything by Anne Rice just because of the way she writes but not this time around, maybe it was the vampires after all.

In this novel we delve deeper into the world of spirits, the kinds of creatures already described in the Vampire Chronicles, incorporeal beings that can summon matter to them to give them bodies and to interact with the world around them. In fact, this book is a kind of Interview with the Spirit, as Azriel spills out his life story to a modern day Jewish university professor.

I enjoyed the parts that took place in ancient Babylon, Rice writes compelling historical novels. Then we jump fairly quickly from then to now as Azriel, bound to his gold infused bones is passed from master to master, eventually loosing all sense of himself and killing anyone that summoned him. That is till now when he finds himself materializing without a master's summons, and more importantly, able to remember his past. He is present at the murder of a young woman, Esther Belkin, and he wants to know why.

And then comes what I found to be a kind of boring part, as he starts investigating Esther's death, he gets involved with Gregory Belkin, leader of some new age cult that is so powerful it is present across the entire world. Gregory has grand plans to wipe out most of the population and rebuild the world in his own image. I don't know, I couldn't quite figure out how Azriel having to deal with Gregory had to do with the rest of the story, we never find out who or what (God?) summoned Azriel to interfere. And I found a lot of the writing repetitive and often slow. For what it's worth you can sum up the actual action in the book in a few pages, the rest is kind of filler, with for what it's worth, is common in Rice's work, she's not so much about writing the plots but about exploring ideas of life, death, immortality and morality. It felt a bit like reading half Vampire Chronicles and half DaVinci Code by Dan Brown (in fact Inferno is the best match, both with the protagonist with no memory and a virus to wipe out the population).

So in the end, I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either. I still look forward to trying one of her other novels next year.