This is a box set of the first four books of Anne Rice's popular Vampire Chronicles series. Her works are immensely popular and have spawned 1 1/2 movies (calling Queen Of The Damned even half a movie is being extremely generous!) and many many sequels. I picked up this box set after being told by numerous people that the first four were worth reading and I was really pleaseatly surprised. (I've heard that the series really goes downhill fast after the The Tail Of The Body Thief)

The vampires in this universe are elegant beings of the night who are very articulate and this traslates to immense description. This may bother some but once you get used to Rice's style, it could best be described as a dreamy flow of the subconscious and it works well for the series. The books take you all over the USA and much of Europe as well and Rice does a great job of creating these vampires that have very human qualities.

The series mainly centers around the title character Lestat. Lestat is a fascianting study of the flawed uber-vampire who does what he wants and refuses to conform to the vampire "rules". He knows he is not perfect but realizes the only way to live through immortality is to enjoy oneself whenever one can. The supporting cast has their fair share of interesting characters and the personalities of the vampires are really the heart of the series.

A couple of things Rice does makes her vampire world so fascinating. The vampires act as their own little microsociety with rules and taboos that are well thought out and extremely interesting. For example the longer a vampire makes before creating another vampire determines how powerfull that new vampire will be. There are complications to living forever that you never would of thought of. The vampires have no sexual urges but instead the act of bloodletting serves as their mental and physical urge for copulation. Vampires don't marry each other but instead have extremely strong emotional bonds with each other and thier own fledglings (when you create another vampire they become your fledgiling) They stay together for an indefinite period until an unknown force breaks their emotional connection. This makes for some fascinating relationships that almost seem like "couples" but without the physical relationship. These bonds are often between same gender vampires and sometimes include three or four vampires. All these interesting parameters make for an web of relationships that frequently change.

The biggest con of the series is that sometimes the prose drags on forever and certain parts could be shorter. They were all good, but actually I thought the fourth book was the best and it was also the shortest.

Bottom Line: An entertaining series that will be most enjoyed by experienced readers and fans of romantic self indulgent nuerotic blood suckers.

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Anne Rice revamped the vampire-horror genre with the publication of "Interview with the Vampire," a supernational drama from the vampire's own mouth. It became an unexpected hit, and spawned a series of sequels that came to be known as the Vampire Chronicles. The first four books of the series are compiled here, although the fourth is not up to the excellent standards of the first three.

"Interview With the Vampire" is the story of Louis, a grieving young widower and plantation owner, whose life is turned upside down when he meets the charming vampire Lestat. Lestat offers him a way out: become a vampire. Louis accepts, but once it's done, he finds that vampirism is more than he bargained for -- especially for his conscience.

"The Vampire Lestat" takes a totally different tack, showing us the world through the enigmatic, charming Lestat's eyes. After years of dormancy, Lestat wakes up in time for the early MTV years of the 1980s, becoming a rock star in the tradition of Ozzy and Black Sabbath. And like Louis, Lestat relates his long life's story -- how he became a vampire, his wanderings over the earth, and his investigations into the origins of vampirism itself...

"Queen of the Damned" builds on that research. Lestat's metal music has caused quite a bit of mayhem -- but not this much before: Akasha, Egyptian queen and mother of all vampires, has reawoken from her comalike sleep. The lesser vampires are having strange dreams, some are being murdered by the ruthless queen. Apparently she wants to kill all men. What is more, Akasha has taken a shine to the roguish Lestat himself...

"The Tale of the Body Thief" opens with lonely anti-hero Lestat deciding that he wants to be mortal again. At least temporarily. So he engages in some corpus-swapping with a con man (Danger! Danger, Will Lestat!), and rediscovers the joys (romance with a nun) and miseries (excretion) of being a human being again. The problem is, said con man is not eager to return Lestat's attractive and immortal body once he has it...

Vampiric autobiography is a given in Anne Rice's bibliography -- she has plenty of bloodsuckers telling us about their lives. But Lestat and Louis's were not just the first ones, but perhaps the most compelling and rich, especially since the two had such radically different viewpoints -- including of one another. Is Lestat a heartless fiend, or a roguish good-craving bad boy? I'd lean towards the latter, to be honest.

Rice does stumble in "Tales of the Body Thief," which seems like too flimsy a plot for Lestat and Co., has an unnecessary nun romance, and which has some very gross moments. However, it does give a stunning look at how a vampire would see the everyday life of a human -- all the problems, discomforts, annoyances and loneliness that we all ignore because we're used to it. It's a more personal story than the epic "Queen of the Damned," which deals with all of vampirekind all through history. (In one book!)

Despite the more controversial recent novels, Anne Rice's first Vampire Chronicles are often reckoned to be modern horror classics. Rich, intriguing and far deeper than you'd think vampire fiction would be.

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I first heard of Anne Rice 11 years ago when her famous book was being released as a motion picture, Interview with the Vampire, of course. I was only 9 years old at the time, but I was already enthralled in the world of vampires, and I had to see the movie. My brother and I saw it 4 or 5 times in theatre alone, and ever since then I have been an Anne Rice fan.

Slowly through the past 11 years I've been reading the Vampire Chronicles. I own all 10 books of the Vampire Chronicles and the two New Tales of the Vampires books in both hardback and paperback. Currently I am almost half way through Blood and Gold and I'm just loving it, but let me get to these four books.

Interview with the Vampire - This book is narrated by the beautiful and self-piteous Louis who has lost all hope of life after the death of his brother whom he blames himself for (Apparently E. A Solinas was basing his Interview review off of the movie where indeed Louis was a widower, however in the book Louis had never been married and was suffering from the loss of his brother, as I said). This book is infinitely more intricately written and more detailed than the movie was, but the movie still had the Interview vibe, considering Anne Rice wrote the screen play (something she failed to do with The Queen of the Damned and it showed). I do not believe that my seeing the movie before reading the book hindered my ability to understand or accept the book any less than if I had read it first. While reading, I saw things that were not clearly explained in the movie, or not even mentioned or included at all. I received a better understanding of how much Claudia really hated both Lestat and Louis and how infinitely ignorant Louis found Lestat to be. And after reading the book, I can say that I enjoyed it more than the movie. This book introduces readers into the world of Anne Rice's vampires through Louis' eyes, and how distorted a world it is.

The Vampire Lestat - This book is the beginning of the saga of Lestat. While reading this book, readers will actually get to know Lestat for who he was as a man and an immortal through his eyes. It will open the world of Lestat that readers who read Interview with the Vampire first, did not even get a glimpse of with Louis' narrative. This was probably my favorite book of the series so far, because I love Lestat's character, and this book is what made me so familiar with him. Anne Rice's writing is also very detailed and stunning, as it always is. Through Lestat's words readers see his change from a man to an immortal and the world he enters into after having to destroy his master. He was not taught the ways of the vampires so he continues doing as he sees fit. Readers will follow him in his journey where he saves his mother, Gabrielle, makes a lunatic of his best friend, Nicolas, first encounters Armand, meets the mentor, Marius, and briefly describes his experience with Louis and Claudia, this is when you truly meet Lestat.

The Queen of the Damned - I'm not even going to mention the movie because I will spend two hours describing how TERRIBLY wrong the movie was. All I will say is that it does not follow the book whatsoever besides the character names and the OVERALL plot. The book, however, was just wonderful. This is the second story of Lestat, in which it is narrated rather strangely. The book begins with Lestat, of course, describing himself once again, and explaining to the reader that they will be taken into the stories of multiple blood drinkers and other people. After that, Anne Rice writes in many narratives to tell the numerous stories, including that of the red haired twins, Maharet and Mekare, a brief story of Pandora, Armand and Daniel, Khayman, Jesse and the Talamasca. She then continues with Lestat's narrative of the rest of the events that occurred with the Divine Mother, Akasha. This was a new style that Anne Rice used for the book, and I think it was very cunning. Readers get to see glimpses of other immortals and their history without an entire book being written. This book is where readers really get to know the most important of the blood drinkers.

The Tale of the Body Thief - I really enjoyed this book, although it was probably my least favorite of the series, again out of what I've read so far. I still loved how it was written, another marvel of Anne Rice. In this book, readers will be taken into the third of Lestat's strange journeys. Here he meets a mysterious man who claims to be able to swap bodies. He teaches Lestat how to do such a thing, and gives him an offer he cannot refuse; the chance to be mortal again. There is no way that Lestat would pass this up, so of course, he does it. This time he gets himself into a serious predicament when the body swapper does not want to return Lestat's immortal self, and he is forced to turn to a member of the Talamasca, David, who Lestat had bonded with. Readers should know who David is by now if they have read Queen of the Damned before reading this. David cannot refuse to aid Lestat, but in the end he finds himself in an even stranger situation all in itself. While trying to retrieve Lestat's body, he was forced out of his own by the thief and had to take retreat into the body that had housed Lestat while he was a mortal man. Due to unfortunate circumstances, he is not able to return to his own body, and Lestat finds himself even more attracted to David now that he has the body of a much much younger man (when reading Queen of the Damned, readers find out that David is in his 70's), thus, forces David into the preternatural life against his will. As I said above, I thought this book was very well written, I just believe that I did not care about the story nearly as much as the others. I believe anyone who truly loves Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles will still enjoy reading this book, even if they don't find it as fascinating as the previous.

Of course, after this comes Memnoch the Devil, which I loved but was saddened that it was the last of Lestat's mystical and heroic stories because he goes into hibernation after the acts which take place in this book, until he returns for the finale, Blood Canticle. Following is The Vampire Armand which is a fast read. I also loved this book and it was definitely different because it was the first after four other books, to be narrated by someone other than Lestat. In this book, the reader really gets to know Armand, and a little bit of Marius. Merrick comes next. This book is all in itself, different. I thought that I would hate it and be bored by it when I first started reading. It is narrated by the above mentioned, David, who is now a vampire, telling the story of a witch, Merrick, whom he's asked to perform a spell for him and Louis. In this book, Lestat wakes from his hibernation and is finally his old self again... and it was about time! Now I am reading Blood and Gold, the story of Marius, and of course, I am just loving it. I have already read over 200 pages and I just started it, but I still have much more to go (it's 564 pages, one of the longest of the Vampire Chronicles), but I know I will enjoy it. Overall, these four books will definitely introduce a reader into the world of Anne Rice's preternatural brood, and if you don't like these first four, you won't like the rest. I'll keep reading until I'm done with the last of the New Tales of the Vampires, which is the story of a newly mentioned vampire, Vittorio. Until then, I'll enjoy every bit of the rest.