#my favourite part in memnoch the devil

[they-stole-my-shmunguss]

"Armand envies you and spies on you far more than you might think."

“I hear Armand and I see him and I ignore him,” I said.

[savagewildnerness]

Well, my first re-read of Memnoch The Devil in a long time is complete (I must have read it several times as a teenager. Otherwise my old copy of the book would be with the Vampire Chronicles I only read once, and it isn't there - my old copy is hidden somewhere, meaning I must have reread it and mislaid it when I did so.)

It took me a long time to read it - partly because I knew that as a teenager, after The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned it was my favourite book... and I was very afraid that I might hate it now... and partly with S2 of the TV show and so Memnoch was put aside... And partly as some bits are very long bits of just talking!

But now I have finished.

And what I think is that... well... I can't speak for teenaged me and what I thought then.

But me now finds that Memnoch has something which isn't that common in The Vampire Chronicles - a beautifully resonant and perfectly tragically satisfying, almost Shakespearian ending.

Anne Rice is wonderful at creating these worlds and especially the characters and conveying their emotion and experience and internal philosophy and existential quests... but sometimes books trail off at the end a little into a "...get ready for something coming in the future..." or even into comparative mundanity... Which is fine as it's not about the ending for them... but not Memnoch. What a wonderful ending Memnoch has. Which I won't talk about as it isn't to be talked about, just to be read.

But I will say - Memnoch's letter. The way Memnoch is so Lestattian in his own character, and so you could imagine in part he was just conjured by Lestat's broken mind... The sadness of the ending and the horror of it and all that it is made clear is happening, which which Lestat doesn't fully describe.

I love how it harkens back to Nicolas and Claudia and The Witches Place and I am back in The Vampire Lestat in a way I haven't been since The Vampire Lestat in the last parts of this book. I love the tenderness of Louis. I love the confused horror. The realness of Hell so you feel like you are there.

I wouldn't say I adored the whole book.... Roger's story is LONG. Memnoch really does go ON (it's interesting... but it's long!)

But the last 1/3 of the book, oh yes - I loved it. I wish all of the Vampire Chronicles had endings as powerful and meaningful as Memnoch does.

Well, just my brief thoughts. Is Memnoch a polarising book?

[leslutdepointedulac]

Vampire Chronicles Fan Tag Game

Tagged by: @desertfangs Thank you! 💞

Post your responses and then tag 5 people to do the same!

First VC Book You Read:

Interview with the Vampire and then I read all the way through the whole series in order from there.

Favorite VC Book:

Interview with the Vampire again lmao. It's my beloved. I love the themes of guilt and grief it explores. It's a very personal story to Anne, and it shows. I mean, I could go on and on and on all day about why I love IWTV but I don't want to waffle on lmao.

VC Book You've Read Least (Or Not At All):

Probably Memnoch the Devil. I have read it but I can only go through that so many times lmfao. I find it really dense and it took me ages to get through even though it's not that long.

That said though, I do love the Lesmand content and the ending, it's just the rest of it I can't deal with.

VC Book You Would Yeet From the Series If You Could (If Any):

I think all the books have their merits and their place in the series. There are some that I love more than others of course, but I don't entirely hate any of them if I'm honest. Even ones like Memnoch, and Merrick for example, where I'm not a fan of them overall, there are still elements of those books that I do like. They all have their part to play, I think.

What's a VC Quote That Lives Rent-Free In Your Head?:

So many quotes, honestly. One of my all time favourites though is:

"Wither thou goest I will go, where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy people shall be my people, and because I have no other god and never will, you shall be my god."

I will always go completely feral over this quote, I love it so much 🥺

How Many Copies of Your Favorite VC Book Do You Own?

I currently have two copies of Interview with the Vampire but there are a couple more that I'm planning on getting soon, so that will bring me up to four. This is also just the actual books, not including the comics, graphic novel and manga, but if you include those as well then I currently have five different copies/versions on IWTV.

I've also got (including other formats) three of both The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned and two of The Tale of the Body Thief.

Tagging: @bubblegum-blackwood @hekateinhell @butchybats @lovevamp & @teethingpains but no pressure of course ❤

[faerywhimsy]

📖 & 📚 & 📕

Ahhh, this is gonna be long my friend ^.^

📖 Favourite book and why... okay this part is maybe not so long. This is The Vampire Armand, because of course it is. The playfulness of Armand as he comes to Marius, the sweetness he allows himself to share with Bianca, the character of BIANCA HERSELF.

Even in misery, Armand is so completely mesmerising. It's when he drops some of his most devastating descriptions of the ones he loves and, honestly, what's more relatable than that?!

📚 Memnoch the Devil wins this dubious award of least favourite. To answer the third question early, I definitely did not read these books in order, and only read Memnoch for the first time last year. I was disappointed.

Honestly, I wasn't brought up with religion, so it's possible that so much of what doesn't make sense to me narratively is due to that. And if that was the case, I would put this book down as not for me and not pick it up again. Because I came to it late and it's easily forgettable.

Except, it has some of the best content between Lestat and Armand in it. Chronologically, I think it's the first time we see Lestat say 'I love you' to Armand? (The shared 'I love you', but it's easy to forget about David honestly.) It's a book that's instrumental in understanding Lestat's mental state from here all the way to Prince Lestat which came almost 10 years later both in real- and book time. If those things aren't enough, it gains new relevance in the final trilogy when we also find out that the aftermath of Memnoch is when Lestat first started hearing Amel.

Whatever one thinks of Memnoch, it's pretty much a cornerstone to the present day happenings across the Coven of the Articulate, not least because Lestat is our main protagonist throughout. Maybe Anne just needed to find a way to put Lestat out of the way in order to focus on the others' (Armand, Louis, Marius) books. But these things keep Memnoch alive and present in my head and I sometimes wish it were otherwise 😅

📕 Coming back to my first introduction to VC, I read The Vampire Lestat first, after having watched the 1994 Interview with the Vampire maybe late-1997?

This is actually a (bad?) habit I've continued through the years - there are far too many books, and if someone has gone to the effort of making a faithful movie or a TV show of something on my TBR pile, I will use that for an alternative because it takes less time to watch a movie than read a book. It's just economics!

Actually, I still don't think I've read the whole of Interview of the Vampire in order, so much as reading passages and parts of the story as the mood takes me.

Amusingly, I did get to Queen of the Damned before the 2001 movie, and all I can say is THANK GOD. I'm sure it would have filtered down even without Tumblr that that was NOT a faithful movie, though I appreciate that would have been a DIFFICULT book to convert.

[high-fructose-lesbianism]

A Subjective Ranking of all 18 Books in the Vampire Chronicles Extended Universe

18. Blood Canticle (2003)

It took me the longest to read Blood Canticle of any of the books because I couldn’t read more than about 25 pages at a time before the urge to throw the book out the nearest window got too strong. The story is bad, the characters are the worst they’ve ever been and the writing style is full-on terrible. Blood Canticle is one of the worst books I’ve read full stop.

17. Taltos (1994)

I hated the Mayfair Witches trilogy. While Taltos was at least the shortest of the three, it was a terrible conclusion to the trilogy. The Taltos are one of Anne Rice’s worst ideas. Each of the books delves more into their mythology and it gets worst the more it’s explored.

16. Blackwood Farm (2002)

A major issue I have with Anne Rice is she insists on telling these extremely lengthy backstories of characters we’ve just met who I almost never give a shit about. That’s the entirety of Blackwood Farm. It’s the backstory of a character I just met and don’t care about whatsoever. Blackwood Farm evokes the classic Anne Rice style of bad where it switches between just being insane and being fucking boring at the drop of a hat. I skimmed most of the book because it was so boring. But then I’d tune in to some insanely weird shit about intersex vampires or ghost twins giving handjobs or whatever was happening and yeah, my attention would of course be held by such insanity. But invariably, the book would drift back into describing wildly uninteresting events with too much detail and I’d tune out again.

15. The Witching Hour (1990)

The Witching Hour has a three paragraph summary on Wikipedia. It is an accurate summation of the events of the book. So then why is this fucking book 968 pages? That’s my main grievance with The Witching Hour; it’s way too fucking long. It’s the least insane of the Mayfair Witches trilogy but also by far the least interesting.

14. Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016)

These fucking bird aliens who inhabited Atlantis are just the Taltos 2.0. There’s a lot of insanity and also boring backstory in this one. I skimmed the backstory of the Atlantean bird aliens and don’t feel like I missed anything. What saves this book from ranking lower is I’m a slut for the main VC characters interacting and this one did have such a thing, plus some good Louis/Lestat moments which is my other big priority with the series. Simultaneous highlight and lowlight of this book is when that one dude looses a hand but it gains sentience, breast feeds off him or something and then becomes his perfect clone. Fucking insanity.

13. Lasher (1993)

Lasher is the best of the Mayfair trilogy because there are genuine moments of horror in this horror novel. On the downside, the Taltos are as always, insane. Also, another signature of Anne Rice’s is sexy and sexualized teenage characters which there is a lot of in this book in the form of 13 year old Mona Mayfair, her affair with Michael Curry and the many scenes where this is excused, justified or even somewhat celebrated. That disturbed me and not in the way I want a horror novel to disturb me.

12. Memnoch the Devil (1995)

In terms of writing style, Memnoch is a lot better than many of the books that will rank higher than it. But this is a subjective ranking and I didn’t give a shit about Anne Rice working through her weird, religious baggage in a series that I’m reading to hear about the exploits of sexy, bisexual vampires. The majority of this book is again, a long backstory from a character we just met and I don’t care about. In this case it’s literally Satan which is a good start but Anne Rice sure has a way of taking too long describing everything which leaves me extremely bored by the narrative.

11. Blood Paradise (2018)

Blood Paradise should be lower in this list. It’s objectively extremely poor. Blood Paradise is basically the inverse of Memnoch; I really liked the story but hated the writing style. This one only ranks so high because it is a story that focuses on the lead vampire characters who are my priority. And yeah, I liked the outline for the story. It’s character-based, no major new characters interrupt the narrative and no insane additions to canon are added. Too bad the writing style feels extremely half-assed. Where usually I’m critical of Anne Rice taking way too long to say anything and focusing on unimportant details, this one is the opposite. It feels extremely rushed. A lot of major, emotional scenes that occur between characters are only a few sentences or paragraphs long. But still, at least this one gave me story content that I could just expand upon in my head instead of insane additions to canon that I’d prefer to ignore.

10. Merrick (2000)

Merrick actually might have my favourite ending to any of the VC novels. I loved Lestat resurrecting Louis from his suicide attempt and then that descends into Lestat, Louis, David and Merrick living in what seems to be perfectly happy polyamory. I totally dug that. But of course, the majority of the book is a backstory of Merrick, a character I just met and don’t care about. Also, we get a bit of David backstory which I seem to remember being him mostly creeping on some young boy who was in expedition with him. Not ideal. 

9. Vittorio, the Vampire (1999)

Vittorio is a fairly effective historical horror. Anne Rice did a lot of research and it shows. That’s not exactly my interest but she did well with it. There’s also some really horrific moment where Vittorio meets a clan of vampires in an old castle who do keep humans like cattle and eat babies and stuff. The major downsides is just that this is a character who we’ve never met before and never see again. Also the fact that Vittorio is 16 and is absolutely sexualized. I’ve really grown tired of Anne Rice’s constant belief that’s in almost all of her writing that teenagers are sexy and it’s totally fine to fuck them. It makes me uncomfortable to say the least.

8. Pandora (1998)

This one’s just pretty good. I’ve no major complaints but no specific bits of it I want to champion either. Again, a lot of historical research is done which is not interesting to me but well done. Also nice to have at least one book with a female vampire protagonist.

7. Prince Lestat (2014)

Prince Lestat is not objectively better than the last two books. I rank it this high mostly out of relief. For ages, Blood Canticle was the last book in The Vampire Chronicles. So, when Prince Lestat was released, it was impossible to see this as anything other than a huge upgrade. And of course, I liked that this book returned to focusing on the lead characters of Lestat, Louis, Marius, Daniel etc. It’s still a baffling idea to have Lestat be the vampire head of state or whatever though. But oh man, that Louis/Lestat moment near the end of the book made me feel a whole lotta feelings.

6. Blood and Gold (2001)

This one is another excuse for Anne Rice to do a lot of historical research. And you know what? Better she spends her energies doing that instead of creating weird, tall supernatural beings with specific quirks that are impossible to take seriously. I like the framing of this one because it’s sort of the inverse of usual. Thorne, a new character is introduced but instead of him telling Marius his story, it’s established character Marius who tells Thorne his story. And he does this the first day they met after Thorne’s awakened after several hundred years and they’ve taken a bath together. That’s just good story structure right there. The most memorable part of this story for me is keeping a vague tally of all the people Marius fell in love with throughout the course of the story. In one 100-page stretch, Marius falls in love five separate times. This grew tiresome but I also just thought it was funny.

5. The Vampire Armand (1998)

I’m the most morally against The Vampire Armand. It’s basically the peak of Anne Rice’s love of sexualizing teens. That’s sort of the whole book. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that around the time of its publication, Anne Rice got back into religion. I think she looked over what she wrote and was like yeah okay, maybe I do need Jesus. But I dunno, I remember really liking it. It was well-written and Armand is one of my favourite characters. I think Anne Rice did actually hit the right mixture of the story being sexy, horrific and rather tragic. Also, that bit at the end where Armand eats a drug dealer’s face and heart in front of some new, human friends is one of my favourite scenes.

4. The Tale of the Body Thief (1992)

There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad in Tale of the Body Thief. I love the body swap aspect and this one has some of the best interactions between characters. On the downside, there absolutely is a 2-page description of Lestat taking a piss, he absolutely commits a rape and him turning David into a vampire was #problematic. But even there, the Lestat and David scene is really well-written and works because Lestat is an absolute piece of shit. Tale of the Body Thief is for better and worse, Lestat at his most Lestat. Still didn’t need to hear about him taking a piss in that much detail, though.

3. Queen of the Damned (1988)

Akasha is the only good villain in any of the Vampire Chronicles books. Plus, Queen of the Damned brought all the characters we’d met in the previous two books together and I was absolutely all about that. At this point in the series, I actually did care about the majority of main characters and their interactions were absolutely spectacular. Only downside is again, we get a lengthy backstory of Akasha that I absolutely skimmed.

2. Interview with the Vampire (1976)

Yeah, it’s only number 2. Because while this book is better written and the start of this whole damn phenomenon, Louis is far from my favourite narrator. Dude’s too morose and shit. Still, the writing style is exquisite and it introduced great characters. As the series went on, Anne Rice clearly ran out of ideas but because this one is the first book, that’s not the case. There’s a lot of ideas here and they aren’t even fucking insane. 

1. The Vampire Lestat (1985)

I’m really only into this series because of how much I love Lestat as a character. I read Interview and thought I was done with the series. Interview was fine but I didn’t think I cared about the sequels. However, six months later when I decided to read The Vampire Lestat, I knew within the first two pages that this was going to be a problem for me. This is exactly my brand of bullshit. It’s just Lestat being a sexy and shitty person who makes out with everyone and overreacts to everything. I love him. And in the third act when it’s revealed he’s been in love with Louis all along and then Louis shows up in the present day and they reunite???? Oh my god. 16 year-old me nearly exploded. The Vampire Lestat is really the sole reason The Vampire Chronicles happened to me as hard as it did. I love this book and its ridiculous narrator/protagonist.

[fromthelibrary]

“Memnoch the Devil” by Anne Rice (Vampire Chronicles, Book 5)

I’m not really sure what I want to say about this book or even what to think of it. The Tale of the Body Thief almost managed to put me off of this series, but I started reading about Lestat’s adventures when I was a teenager and so decided to give him another chance. In this case, I’m going to do a point form review of my likes and dislikes for this book.

What I Liked:

Lestat is the absolute worst. He throws temper tantrums, he’s vain, he doesn’t listen to anyone and he’s absolutely ridiculous. Sometimes this makes the events of the story funnier than I think they’re intended to be,but generally I find it really interesting to read about Lestat’s world and adventures through his own skewed perceptions and deeply flawed personality. I mean, he interrupted the beginning of the story to describe his Brooks Brothers suit in painstaking detail and imagine what David must have thought of him. Lestat is a very distinct and charismatic voice and I think that is the reason for a lot of the popularity of this series

Really, I’m down for almost any book with a sympathetic devil

It’s a testament to how well this book is written that I read almost 400 pages of dialogue and wasn’t bored senseless. There is some action at the beginning and the end, but mostly it is just a very long conversation between Lestat and Memnoch as they travel through the distant past. Not a lot happens in this book, but when it does it happens all at once, almost unexpectedly, violently.

A really interesting take on religion which tries to reconcile creation and evolution, religion and science, humanity and nature, the relationship between the devil and God and just generally explain why a benevolent, omnipotent God would allow bad things to happen. Despite an attempt to bring all religions into the explanation that Memnoch offers Lestat, it comes across very Catholic in flavour and maybe does not do the best job of accounting for polytheistic or more philosophical type religions. Memnoch’s origin story for the angels, the universe and humanity is one of the reasons I’m not sure how to feel about this book, and I think anyone interested in these type of ideas might enjoy this book specifically for this conversation.

What I Disliked:

Parts of this book were super creepy. And not in the spine-tingling, pulse-racing way you would want from a vampire novel, but in a way that’s just kind of gross. The way Dora’s character in particular is described and presented is just . . . not my cup of tea at all. This is the same thing that put me off The Tale of the Body Thief; Lestat’s interactions with mortal women are always jarringly unpleasant for me.

Books with ambiguous endings are not to my taste. I can see where many readers might really enjoy looking back on the story to try to work out whether Memnoch was lying, and what his plan for Lestat actually was. It might even be fun to look back on Queen of the Damned for evidence that Maharet or any other vampire had encountered Memnoch. But endings like this just are not my favourite.

While Dora herself has a part to play in the larger story happening with Lestat and Memnoch, the little side story with Roger and the Wynken de Wilde books is strangely out of place. It is set up at the beginning as though Roger himself and the books he collected will be very important and then they are forgotten until the end of the story. I’m left wondering if it’s meant to be implied that Wynken and his following had actually encountered Memnoch and were attempting to live by his interpretations of nature, humanity and the way into Heaven. Am I missing something?

I will most likely pick this series up again later, but this book was not one of my favourites and I am not sure these will ever regain the appeal for me that the first two or three novels had.

[isolationstreet]

I've been in a very listen to jcss mood on repeat mood today and I blame the combination of me stanning drew sarich and me rereading my favourite parts of memnoch the devil yesterday

[savagewildnerness]

I read all of the Vampire Chronicles as a teenager; some of the later ones, as they were released. I only ever reread TVL & QOTD as they’re my favourites (especially TVL which I have reread many, many times since then)… although I know when I was a teenager I also adored Memnoch the Devil & that was the only book I felt I wanted other people to read it too.

I think I never reread Memnoch because of Lestat’s existential questioning & the deep impact the book had on me & not long after I read it, my Dad died. It isn’t that I ever believed in God myself. My Mum is Catholic, but I wasn’t brought up religious & my Dad didn’t believe. But where I could have said I was agnostic till then, after my Dad died that was an absolute no for me. I had to know for certain what I believed.

And I think part of why Lestat is such a powerful character; The Character to me is that his reasoning underlay my personal development & so he helped me when I had to delve deep into what I believed in the most difficult context (when someone is dead, you wish you could believe in more, at least because it would give some comfort and so be easier… but I do not believe that. I believe when we are dead, that is it: utterly dead, dead, dead, gone.)

Anyway… I think I’m going to go through all the chronicles now. Not just my favourites. I don’t know: does it seem silly that when I do deep existential questioning or sink into dark questioning of my fundamental beliefs, Lestat is ALWAYS there with me? He is who I talk such matters over with, I suppose… and that’s despite that only 2 of the books did I ever reread till now. But Memnoch particularly had such an impact on me that even having never reread it, its impact is still the same now. Although I’m a bit afraid to reread that in case I don’t feel it the same now I’m not a teenager???

Well, TVL was actually the first Anne Rice book I read ever, but I am returning now to Interview with the Vampire for the first time since I was in my young teens & this page has just broken my heart. I was young when I first read this book. I wasn’t thinking about Anne Rice herself at all; only the book. I doubt I knew, when I read it about Anne’s own daughter.

But reading it now, knowing the context in which it was written, I hear Claudia’s challenge to Lestat & Louis “Which of you made me what I am?” as something veiled, but deeper too: Anne making her daughter challenge her & Stan (incidentally Stan was my Dad’s name too) as to why she had to die. (Not saying this was her daughter’s feeling in reality in any way ever, or even necessarily Anne’s intention. Only what I felt just now.)

Anyway - No wonder Lestat & Louis had to be redeemable, loveable, beautifully in love vampires by The End Of It All, in order to overcome this pain & trauma & the impossibility of the wrongness of death (that any soul can cease is unimaginably awful. Incomprehensible when that’s your own child & you have no power over it) that is surely impossible to ever overcome in reality, but which (o the joy of fiction), in fiction, these characters can be loveable, loved & they can be “redeemed”, they can be ok, they can endure & they can even become The Character eternally, just like their immortal selves for I am sure thousands of people, just like (you &?) me.