Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice

Bodice Tipplers

HAPPY HALLOWEEN to those who celebrate! We're continuing our Halloween tradition by bringing you another Anne Rice jam with Special Guest Dr. Claire! Last year we covered The Vampire Lestat and you should totally go back and listen to that one too. This time we didn't go for three hours - two and a half hours is not three hours. We got off the rails because quite frankly this book never even got on the rails. This book is a speedboat trying to use the train tracks. That's our excuse here.

The Queen of the Damned is, we all agreed, where the Vampire Chronicles went off the rails. It gets shaggy. It makes... somewhere south of narrative sense. It theoretically starts off where The Vampire Lestat leaves off (so if you want to know and you haven't read either, start with last year's podcast) but it actually takes half a book to get there. It has a bunch of ancient vampires and some baby vampires. It has crazy vampire mythology. It has some seriously dicey understandings of the developing world. It's bananas. Meet Akasha! She's the oldest vampire! She has dumb ideas! She's burning all the vampires. She burns most of them but the ones she doesn't burn talk a lot! Then a bog witch shows up and yanks her head clean off! End of book. See, Anne? That didn't need to be five hundred pages!

Content warnings - it's a vampire book so it's got all sorts of nonconsensual stuff going on but, like, even more so. It has people who Rice thinks are asexual because she doesn't understand the term. It has grooming. It has bananas racism.

Patreon alert! In November we'll be doing a Halloween Hangover episode for patreons only about the Queen of the Damned movie! Join now!

And as promised, don't forget to check out our show notes to see some international covers for this book at our website, www.bodicetipplers.com!