That said, I would love to know Ann Rice's books. It would be special to read them on the train. What is their appeal to you, if you would like to share? Do they frighten you?
She deals with the moral issues involved in being human from the perspectives of those who are no longer human. Less so in the books about witches, very much so in the books about vampires, she deals with what happens to her characters when they are freed of the fears attending all things to do with death. The spiritual issues of redemption and purpose, and the moral issues of theft, of the taking of life to sustain your own. Her characters cannot die. They must take the lives of others to live or suffer unending torment.
A moral choice.
One of the vampires refuses to take human life.
Most of them celebrate the savagery of it because that is their dilemma and they choose to face it.
All of them have come to terms with what they must do to survive ~ with the moral question at the heart of it.
Life is described as the Savage Garden. Beautiful, heartless, cherished, regretted; savored.
Religious belief, the cruelty and the beauty and mankind's desperate attempt to make sense of it all. (She has written a non-fiction account of her own spiritual journey, and of her return to Catholicism.) She has written a number of outright pornographic novels, too. I have not read those. There is a heavy sensuality and graphic description in her writing you may find offensive. It doesn't seem out of place or contrived. I don't know what else to say about that. Her novels are filled with that kind of imagery.
She's written a novel,
Cry to Heaven, about castrato males and the choirs of St Peter's. Taken from the truth of what happened in those times.
Servant of the Bones will teach much about Judaism, and about Cyrus, and about Alexander the Great. That one would be least frightening, I think. A young Jewish son agrees to be encased in gold, and to stand beside the conquering Cyrus as he parades through the streets of Babylon. As he is dying from the gold, he is turned into a powerful spirit, but not by Cyrus. Those who perform the magic to do this to him don't know what they are doing and so, though he was created to be an evil thing, he has free will.
He is his own.
He is sent by Cyrus to the most powerful magician of the time, who teaches him that the purpose of life is to love, and to learn.
This is the one thing he remembers, throughout all of time.
The book proceeds, from there. I have given nothing important away, but that is the flavor of the book.
Her books always deal with the questions of good and evil, and of how it happens that her characters make their decisions.
She writes about God, and about what that would mean for a being who may never die. The Stairway to Heaven is envisioned multiple times in her novels. The character Lestat, a vampire, is taken to Heaven, and to Hell, by a powerful angel in one of her novels. One of the vampires had, as a Russian boy, been destined to be taken into the Cave of the Monks, an honor to the monk who will be encased to his neck in soil and given only enough sustenance to keep the body alive, that the monk could come to know God without distraction. The boy is turned into a vampire, instead. When the Veil of Veronica, the cloth said to have borne the imprinted image of the Christ, is found, this vampire, hundreds of years old by this time, tries to fly into the sun to release his spirit, to unite with God.
He awakens, burnt beyond hope but alive, his spirit broken.
There is a whole book about that, about God, and about longing and loneliness and hope. And evil, and about what it is.
Cedar
