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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * In another feat of hypnotic storytelling, Anne Rice continues the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles that began with the now classic Interview with the Vampire and continued with The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned.
Lestat speaks. Vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals. For centuries he has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Lestat is alone. And suddenly all his vampire rationale--everything he has come to believe and feel safe with--is called into question. In his overwhelming need to destroy his doubts and his loneliness, Lestat embarks on the most dangerous enterprise he has undertaken in all the danger-haunted years of his long existence.
The Tale of the Body Thief is told with the unique--and mesmerizing--passion, power, color, and invention that distinguish the novels of Anne Rice.
Author Notes
Anne Rice was born Howard Allen O'Brien on October 4, 1941 in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1964 and master's degree in English and creative writing in 1972 from San Francisco State University.
She published her first short story in 1965 called October 4, 1948. Her first book, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976. It was made into a film starring Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, and Tom Cruise in 1994. She wrote various series in the same genre including the rest of the Vampire Chronicles, the Mayfair Witches books, and The Wolf Gift Chronicles. Her novel, Feast of All Saints, became a Showtime mini-series in 2001. Her other works include Cry to Heaven, Servant of the Bones, and Violin.
In 1998, Rice returned to the Catholic Church and for some time only wrote for Christ or about Christ. These works include Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, and Called Out of Darkness.
Anne Rice died on December 11, 2021 at the age of 80.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The fourth book of the Vampire Chronicles series, launched in 1976 with Interview with the Vampire (which Knopf is simultaneously reissuing in cloth), reconfirms Rice's power as a mesmerizing raconteur. In sensuous, fluid prose, she follows the tormented vampire Lestat as he struggles to integrate his bloodthirsty nature with his aspirations to achieve humanity. Desiring to see the sun, to love without taking blood, to seek God as mortals do, Lestat enters blindly into an unholy bargain. In order to experience mortality for one day and two nights, he agrees to switch bodies with the scoundrel Raglan James, a former member of the secret order of scholarly occultists called the Talamasca, and a ``sinister being,'' according to David Talbot, the order's superior general and Lestat's longtime friend and advisor. But Lestat has given little thought to how James intends to use his body and its vampiric powers. Trapped in the mortal state, Lestat must overcome the human frailties of despair and physical pain to thwart James's evil intentions and, with Talbot's help, regain his immortal self. Drawing on characters met in earlier novels as well as the lushly evoked settings of New Orleans, Miami and Paris, Rice once again deftly lures readers into the enchanting world of her anguished and deeply sympathetic hero. 500,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Rice fans awaiting the finale of 1990's The Witching Hour will be only temporarily dismayed by the author's fourth bloodletting and the return of the Vampire Lestat--in what is Rice's most strongly plotted novel yet. Lestat first appeared in the cloth-of-purple-velvet Interview With the Vampire (1976), the first modern novel to take up vampirism on a scale of detail whose seriousness sowed the dragon's teeth of imitators. Here, Lestat holds the storyteller's reins and tells of his recent folly in attempting to return to mortality. He despairs of his present 200 years of life, then goes to the Gobi desert to commit suicide by flying into the sun. But death by sunlight is too painful to bear. So when he is approached by Raglen James--a con artist who has been kicked out of the secret psychic organization The Talamasca, good guys with a computerized record of all major evil events caused by nasty spirits, and who has learned the trick of body switching--Lestat is fatally seduced into switching bodies with James for two nights and a day. This is a third of the waffling way into a novel that is slow to set its hook. But once Rice gets to the body switch, she provides her most inspired pages ever. Sweet-smelling, cruel, proud, self-pitying, death-proof, snotty, multimulti-billionaire honcho vampire Lestat finds himself in the tall, handsome body of a man who bears every human frailty, suffers proneness to a killer cold that lands him in the hospital, has mortal fears by the dozen, synapses much slower than Lestat's, sloshy flesh that twists with hunger, always feels leaden, and must descend to the horrid stinks of the toilet. He's robbed blind by James, a great hacker thief, and falls in love with a Catholic nun--while James, on a blood-flying rampage, won't give Lestat his body back. Irresistible as Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin's All of Me. (Book-of-the-Month Dual Selection for December)
Booklist Review
/*STARRED REVIEW*/ Rice loves the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt--loves his reckless will, his untamable thirst for life's power, his immortal vigor, and his unaging physical beauty. Equally, she seems to love the erotic longing that makes each taste of blood fill his body so completely with the obliterating ecstasy of life's own pulse--as if for that moment, life and death were coupling in her soul even as they are coupling in his. There is no doubt that Rice's greatest gift is for rendering a possibly perverse but powerful eroticism in new and unexpected forms; at her best she is a shameless disciple of Masoch and de Sade, as when Lestat couples (as only a vampire can) with his beautiful but dying mother and restores her to life. As for the remythologizing of vampire legend that took up the better part of The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned, it is--despite its brilliance--mercifully over in The Tale of the Body Thief. But so, sadly--or at least kept at bay--is the near-pornographic eroticism that rippled with such haunting menace through Interview with a Vampire and the early part of Lestat. If only The Tale of the Body Thief had a little more lusty throat-piercing, it might have been the most perfect of the four tales, for certainly it has a coherent plot (a problem for Rice) and captures vividly Lestat's almost Zarathustrian will-to-power, tested here when he is tricked into returning to mortality by a con-man playing on his nostalgia for the sensuality of life. Here again are David Talbot, Louis, and the ghost of Claudia. But the few other characters in the novel are new, as is the idea of the body thief, who can swap his soul with another's. Yet it is only in the last few, cruel pages that Rice really takes off. It was this we were waiting for--the Lestat that repels and seduces us, for whose blood we, too, would lay bare our throats! Rice has a number of faults, in short, but the dark saga of her imagination seems continually to surmount them. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1992)0679405283Stuart Whitwell
Library Journal Review
This fourth book of the ``The Vampire Chronicles'' is by far the weakest. The plot involves everybody's favorite blood drinker, Lestat de Lioncourt, who foolishly strikes a bargain with sinister sorcerer Raglan James for a brief exchange of bodies; the soul of each vacates its respective flesh and slips into that of the other. Once befanged, James welshes on the deal, so Lestat, aided by David Talbot, Superior General of the Talamasca (a sort of CIA of the supernatural) must pursue and evict him from the immortal coil. The characters' body swapping could have made fun reading, but rather than using the vampire powers to truly seize the night, Rice has James merely dance with old ladies on the QE2 and rob wall safes. Lestat in human form contracts pneumonia, adopts a stray dog, and has safe sex with a nun. In between, there are doses of homoerotica and much silly talk on the nature of God, the soul, and good and evil. Though Rice's popularity demands its purchase, this book has little sound and less fury that signify next to nothing. A real disappointment. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/92; BOMC main selection.-- Michael Rogers, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.