The time is now.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks - as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead...

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently...carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir - young, romantic, cultivated - to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless" life...learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on to the blood of human beings...to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not the hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him...

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire - all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child - and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of sudden, stolen opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court...night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death - a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below...

We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be...

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagnings...to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Theater des Vampires, the beautiful, lewd and febrile mime theater whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within...to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings the, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an initimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled...

In an unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, loyalty and treachery, as vampires are created, destroyed, avenged, and "remade," as vampire worlds are summoned up in all their evil and frightening enchantment - the sensuous power, the profound feeling, the wit and verisimilitude of Anne Rice's narrative announced a literary imagination of the first order.

Lestat. The vampire hero of Anne Rice's enthralling new novel is a creature of the darkest and richest imagination. Once an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-revolutionary France, now a rock star in the demonic, shimmering 1980's, he rushes through the centuries in search of other like him, seeking answers to the mystery of his eternal, terrifying existence. His is a mesmerizing story - compassionate, complex, and thrilling.

In 1976, a uniquely seductive world of vampires was unveiled in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire...in 1985, a wild and voluptuous voice spoke to us, telling the story of The Vampire Lestat...and now, Anne Rice continues her extraordinary "Vampire Chronicles" with The Queen of the Damned. It is a feat of mesmeric storytelling, a chillingly hypnotic entertainment in which the oldest and most powerful forces of the night are unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

Three brilliantly colored naratives intertwine as the story unfolds:

• The rock star known as Vampire Lestat, worshipped by millions of spellbound fans, prepares for a concert in San Francisco. Among the audience - pilgrims in a blind swoon of adoration - are hundreds of vampires, creatures who see Lestat as a "greedy fiend risking the secret prosperity of all his kind just to be loved and seen by mortals," fiends themselves who hate Lestat's power and who are determined to destroy him...
• The sleep of certain men and women - vampires and mortals scattered around the world - is haunted by a vivid, mysterious dream: of twins with fiery red hair and piercing green eyes who suffer and unspeakable tragedy. It is a dream that slowly, tauntingly reveals its meaning to the dreamers as they make their way toward each other - some to be destroyed on the journey, some to face an even more terrifying fate at journey's end...
• Akasha - Queen of the Damned, mother of all vampires - rises after a 6,000 year sleep and puts into motion a heinous plan to "save" mankind from itself and to make "all the myths of the world real" by elevating herself and her chosen son/lover to the level of the gods: "I am the fulfillment and I shall from this moment on be the cause..."

These narrative threads wind sinuously across a vast, richly detailed tapestry of the violent, sensual world of vampirism, taking us back 6,000 years to its beginnings. As the stories of the "first brood" of blood drinkers are revealed, we are swept across the ages, from Egypt to South America to the Himalayas to all the shrouded corners of the globe where vampires have left their mark. Vampires are created - mortals succumbing to the sensation of "being emptied, of being devoured, of being nothing." Vampires are destroyed. Dark rituals are performed - the rituals of ancient creatures prowling the modern world. And finally, we are brought to a moment in the twentieth century when, in an astonishing climax, the fate of the living dead - and perhaps of the living, all the living - will be decided.

In this most elaborate and enthralling of Anne Rice's vampire novels, she transports us more deeply than ever before into the complex, erotic, electrifying vampire world she has so masterfully created.

The Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you. It's about something that happened to me. It begins in Miami, in the year 1990, and I really want to start right there. But it's important that I tell you about the dreams I'd been having before that time, for they were very much part of the tale too. I'm talking now about dreams of a child vampire with a woman's mind and an angel's face, and a dream of my mortal friend David Talbot.

But there were dreams also of my mortal boyhood in France - of winter snows, my father's bleak and ruined castle in the Auvergne, and the time I went out to hunt a pack of wolves that were preying upon our poor village.

Dreams can be a real as events. Or so it seemed to me afterwards...

In Anne Rice's extraordinary new novel, the Vampire Lestat - outsider, canny monster, hero-wanderer - is at last offered the chance to be redeemed.

He is brought into direct confrontation with both God and the Devil, and into the land of Death.

We are in New York. The city is blanketed in snow. Through the whiteness Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic daughter of a drug lord, the woman who arouses Lestat's tenderness as no mortal ever has.

While torn between his vampire passions and his overwhelming love for Dora, Lestat is confronted by the most dangerous adversaries he has yet known.

He is snatched from the world itself by the mysterious Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil. He is invited to be a witness at the Creation. He is taken like the ancient prophets into the heavenly realm and is ushered into Purgatory.

He must decide if he can believe in the Devil or in God. And finally, he must decide which, if either, he will serve.

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 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 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.

In the latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand - eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. Armand, who first appeared in all his dark glory more than twenty years ago in the now-classic Interview with the Vampire, the first of The Vampire Chronicles, the novel that established its author worldwide as a magnificent storyteller and creator of magical realms.

Now, we go with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood - a ruined city under Mongol dominion - and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter an who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood.

As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to chose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.

With 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 Cosimo de'Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits 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 his 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 the 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.

In her mesmerizing new novel, the author of The Vampire Chronicles and the saga of the Mayfair Witches demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magic. 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 whom 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 realm. It is he who recounts Merrick's haunting tale - a tale that takes us from the New Orleans of past and present to the jungles of Guatamala, from the Maya ruins of a century 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 otherworldly fascinations are locked together in a dance of seduction, death and rebirth.

The Vampire Chronicles continue with Anne Rice's spellbinding new novel, in which the great vampire Marius returns.

The golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millennia, once mentor to The Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious foe of the Evil Doer, reveals in his own intense yet intimate voice the secrets fo this two-thousand-year existence.

Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, kidnapped and made a "blood god" by the Druids, Marius becomes the embittered protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the supernatural race resides.

We follow him through his heartbreaking abandonment of the vampire Pandora. Through him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine and the horrific sack of the Eternal City itself as the hands of the Visigoths.

Bravely, Marius seeks a new civilization in the midst of glittering Constantinople, only to meet with the blood drinker Eudoxia. We see him ultimately returning to his beloved Italy, where after the horrors of the Black Death, he is restored by the beauty of the Renaissance. We see him become a painter living dangerously yet happily among mortals, giving his heart to the great Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the mysterious young apprentice, Armand.

Moving from Rome to Florence, Venice and Desden, and to the English castle of the secret scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel reaches its dramatic finale in our own time, deep in the jungle where Marius, having told his life story, seeks some measure of justice from the oldest vampires for the world.

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 a 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 foward in time, from Quinn's boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present-day New Orleans, from 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-love 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.

Anne Rice continues her astonishing Vampire Chronicles with the story of Lestat's passionate quest for redemption, goodness and the love of Rowan Mayfair.

Here are all the brilliantly conceived principal characters that make up Anne Rice's world of vampires and witches: Mona Mayfair, who's come to Blackwood Farm to die and is, instead, brought into the realm of the undead...Rowan Mayfair, brilliant neurosurgeon and witch, who finds herself dangerously drawn to Lestat...her husband, Michael Curry, hero of the Mayfair Chronicles, who seeks Lestat's help with the temporary madness of his wife...Patsy, country-western singer, who returns to avenge her death at the hands of her son, Quinn Blackwood.

And here is the spirit of Julien Mayfair, guardian of the family, determined to torment Lestat eternally for what he has done to Mona...the riddle of the five-thousand-year-old Taltos, involving Mona's child...and, at the book's center, the Vampire Lestat, once the epitome of evil and now - following the transformation set in motion with Memnoch the Devil - struggling with his vampirism and yearning for goodness, purity and love as he contends with ghosts, legends, secrets and the mystery of the Taltos, and as he wrestles with the fate of his beloved Rowan Mayfair.

"Come around, Claudia. You're ill, do you hear me?

"You must do what I tell you to get well.

"You must drink it."

Meticulously extracted from the pages of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's seminal novel, Claudia's story related the tale of the vampire who never should have been through the yes of the titula character, providing new insights into her mind and story. Lavishly illustrated by newcomer Ashley Marie Witter in her debut graphic novel, this volume will be a treasured addition to the library of any Anne Rice aficionado.

From Anne Rice, perennial best seller, single-handed reinventor of the vampire universe beginning with the now iconic Interview with the Vampire - a stunning departure, a surprising and compelling return..a new, exhilarating novel that depens Rice's vampire mythology and gives us a chilling hypnotic, rich mystery-thriller.

In Prince Lestat, the long-awaited return to the all-encompasing realm of the Vampire Chronicles, Rice once again summons up the irresistable spirit world of the oldest and most powerful forces between Heaven and Earth, including the indomitable and invisible Amel, whose thirst for human blood gave birth to the horror of the immortal Undead. Rice picks up where she left off more than a quarter century ago with the uniquely seductive The Queen of the Damned and the Vampire Lestat to create an extraordinary new sphere of spirits and forces - the characters, legend, and lore of all the Vampire Chronicles.

The novel opens with the vampire world in crisis...vampires have been proliferating out of control; burnings have commenced across the globe, huge massacres similar to those carried out by Akasha...Old vampires, roused from slumber in the earth, are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn vampire-mavericks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco.

As the novel moves from present-day New York and the West Coast to ancient Egypt, third-century Carthage, fourteenth-century Rome, the Venice of the Renaissance, the worlds and beings of all the Vampire Chronicles - Louis de Pointe du Lac, the eternally young Armand, whose face is that of a Botticelli angel; Mekare and Maharet; Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true Child of the Millenia, along with all the other new, seductive supernatural creatures - come together in this large, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious novel to ultimately rise up and seek out who (or what) the Voice is, and to discover the secret of what it desires and why...

And at the book's center, the seemingly absent, curiously missing hero-wanderer, the dangerous rebel-outlaw - the hope of the Undead, the dazzling Prince Lestat...

From Anne Rice, conjurer of beloved best-selling metaphysical tales, creator of mythologies and mystical ancient histories - an ambitious and rich new vampire novel of utopian vision, daring and power.

At the novel's center: the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, hero, leader, inspirer, irresistible force, irrepressible spirit, battling (and ultimately reconciling with) a strange otherworldly form that has somehow taken possession of his undead body and soul. This ancient and mysterious power and unearthly spirit of vampire lore has all the force, history, and insidious reach of the unknowable Universe.

It is through this spirit, considered benign for thousands of vampire years and throughout the Vampire Chronicles, that we come to be told the hypnotic tale of a great sea power of ancient times: a mysterious heaven on earth situated on a boundless continent - and of how and why, and in what manner and with what far-reaching purpose, this force came to build and rule the great legendary empire of centures ago that thrived in the Atlantic Ocean.

And as we are taken on an electrifying journey through this golden civilization and see its ways and customs, its fantastical advancements and purity of vision, we come to understand its brief flash of possibility as we bear witness to its sudden, catastrophic end, like a flare from the guttering of a dying candle, a volcanic perishing that takes place within a day and a night, a breaking apart of this might empire into darkness and molten gold, expelling all into the sea, leaving in its wake underwater ruins throughout the world.

And as we learn of the mighty, resonant powers and perfections of this lost kingdom of Atalantaya, the lost realms of Atlantis, we come to understand its secrets, and how and why the vampire Lestat, indeed all the vampires, must reckon so many millenia later with the terrifying force of this ageless, all-powerful Atalantaya spirit.

An exhilarating novel that deepens Rice's vampire mythology as it brings together the ancient worlds and beings of the Vampire Chronicles and opens up to us a whole new universe of characters, history, storytelling, and legend.

The Vampire Chronicles continue with a riveting, rich saga--part adventure, part fairy-tale--of Prince Lestat and the story of the Blood Communion as he tells the tale of his coming to rule the vampire world and the eternal struggle to find belonging, a place in the universe for the undead, and how, against his will, he must battle the menacing, seemingly unstoppable force determined to thwart his vision and destroy the entire vampire netherworld.

In this spellbinding novel, Lestat, rebel outlaw, addresses the tribe of vampires, directly, intimately, passionately, and tells the riveting story of the formation of the Blood Communion and how he became Prince of the vampire world, the true ruler of this vast force, and how his vision for all the Children of the Universe to thrive as one, came to be.

The tale spills from Lestat's heart, as he speaks first of his new existence as reigning monarch--and then of his fierce battle of wits and words with the mysterious Rhoshamandes, proud Child of the Millennia, reviled outcast for his senseless slaughter of the legendary ancient vampire Maharet, forever wise and loving and twin to Mekare the Keeper of the Sacred Core; Rhoshamandes, a force who refuses to live in harmony at the Court of Prince Lestat and threatens all that Lestat has dreamt of.

As the tale unfolds, Lestat takes us from the towers and battlements of his ancestral castle in the snow-covered mountains of France to the verdant wilds of lush Louisiana with its lingering fragrances of magnolias and night jasmine; from the far reaches of the Pacific's untouched islands to the 18th-century city of St. Petersburg and the court of the Empress Catherine . . .

Anne Rice's rich masterpiece in an exciting new form. Collected for the first time, here are the twelve extraodinary illustrated volumes that form the graphic novel of The Vampire Lestat. Evocative full-color paintings and an artful abridgement of the original text capture the inimitable spirit and atmosphere of this passionate, complex, and thrilling tale.

The story begins in our own time with Lestat, tall, blond, and handsome, a world-renowned rock star. His gifts are timeless, his youth never withers. But he was not always the powerful and famous child of darkness. Before his long earth-encrusted sleep, he was an aristocrat in the heady days of pre-Revolutionary France. It was then that he came face-to-face with the incarnation of evil and the temptations of love that he has ravenously pursued through time. Where it has led him and what he has become is the heart of the tale that has captivated millions of readers.

The scenes illustrated in this graphic novel are quite explicit and are not intended for young readers.