THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED

The sensual atmospheres and wonderfully human monsters that made Interview With a Vampire and The Vampire Lestat so delightful can be found here, but only briefly: the third book in Rice's Vampire Chronicles is thin, unconvincing, and a grave disappointment. Six thousand yearn ago, in the Middle East, two good witches, Maharet and Mekate, twin sisters, worked their small magics, communing with the spirits. Under duress, they reveal to Akasha, the selfish and beautiful new Queen of Egypt, that her religion is false, her gods only prankish spirits. Akasha has them mutilated; one of their attendant spirits, with a taste for blood, exacts revenge by taking over her body and making her first vampire. Now, after sleeping for millennia, growing immensely powerful, Akasha has woken to the music of the Vampire Lestat, and plans to install herself as goddess of the world. She starts by killing all the vampires except a handful and taking Lestat as her beauty- and power-besotted consort. The good vampires—some familiar: Marius, Armand, Gabrielle, Louis—get together to stop her' Maharet reveals her story, the origin of them all; until defeated, Akasha proceeds with her plan to end violence: kill nine out of every ten men on earth. There are a few winning new characters, and early on, some good scenes, but these are more than offset by Maharet's long tale (told in a tone of mock-solemnity, dragging thinly on and on), the silliness of Akasha's plan, the sophomoric debate that goes with it, and her deus-ex-machina defeat.