Book News – The Vampire Lestat is back!

The Queen of the Undead is back, with her first Vampire Chronicle in over a decade – marking the return of one of the most popular vampires of all time: Lestat de Lioncourt…

Anne Rice transformed the vampire genre, paving the way for the current vampire craze that has swept both the entertainment and publishing industries. Rice’s first book in The Vampire Chronicles series, Interview with the Vampire, was published almost 40 years ago and made into the Oscar-nominated film of the same name, starring Tom Cruise and Brat Pitt, with a screenplay by Rice.

Universal and Imagine Entertainment have just acquired the movie rights to all of Anne Rice’s bestselling Vampire Chronicles series following the ‘amoral, seductive 18th century nobleman turned vampire, Lestat de Lioncourt’, including the latest novel PRINCE LESTAT.Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci – who worked on the Transformers and Star Trek movies together – will produce the films.

The vampire world is in crisis – their kind has been proliferating out of control and, thanks to technologies undreamed of in previous centuries, they can communicate as never before. Roused from their earth-bound slumber, ancient ones are in thrall to the Voice: which commands that they burn fledgling vampires in cities from Paris to Mumbai, Hong Kong to Kyoto and San Francisco. Immolations, huge massacres, have commenced all over the world. Who – or what – is the Voice? What does it desire, and why?

There is only one vampire, only one blood drinker, truly known to the entire world of the Undead. Will the dazzling hero- wanderer, the dangerous rebel-outlaw Lestat heed the call to unite the Children of Darkness as they face this new twilight?

Anne Rice’s epic, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious new novel brings together all the worlds and beings of the legendary Vampire Chronicles, from present-day New York and Ancient Egypt to fourth-century Carthage and Renaissance Venice; from Louis de Pointe du Lac; Armand the eternally young; Mekare and Maharet; to Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the Secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true child of the Millennia. It also introduces many other seductive supernatural creatures, and heralds significant new blood.

The wonderful Matthew MacFadyen read from the book at the Midnight launch party at the British Library, London, last week:

About the Author

Anne Rice is the author of more than thirty internationally bestselling books including the ‘Mayfair Witches’ sequence, ‘The Songs of the Seraphim’ and, most recently, ‘The Wolf Gift Chronicles’. The phenomenon that became ‘The Vampire Chronicles’ started with Interview with the Vampire in 1976, later made into a film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and culminated with Blood Canticle in 2003.

Prince Lestat is the first new Vampire Chronicle novel in over a decade. Anne Rice lives in California.

Images courtesy of Chatto and Windus.