Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat by Anne Rice (English) Paperback Book

Description: Blood Communion by Anne Rice NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this spellbinding novel, Lestat, rebel outlaw, addresses the tribe of vampires, telling us the mesmerizing story of how he became prince of the vampire world, and of the formation of the Blood Communion, and how his vision for the Children of the Universe to thrive as one, came to be.Lestat takes us from his ancestral castle in the snow-covered mountains of France to the verdant wilds of lush Louisiana, with its lingering fragrances of magnolias and night jasmine; from the far reaches of the Pacifics untouched islands to the 18th-century city of St. Petersburg and the court of the Empress Catherine. He speaks of his fierce battle of wits and words with the mysterious Rhoshamandes, proud Child of the Millennia, reviled outcast for his senseless slaughter of the legendary ancient vampire Maharet, avowed enemy of Queen Akasha, who refuses to live in harmony at court and who threatens all Lestat has dreamt of.... FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography ANNE RICE is the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021. Review Praise for Anne Rice and The Vampire Chronicles: "[Rices] undead characters are utterly alive." —The New York Times Book Review "No one writing today matches [Anne Rices] deftness with the erotic." —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Anne Rice will live on through the ages of literature. . . . To read her is to become giddy as if spinning through the mind of time, to become lightheaded as if our blood is slowly being drained away." —San Francisco Chronicle "Fans old and new will find this book an effusive celebration of a saga now more than forty years in the making." —Publishers Weekly"Bloody marvelous." —Time "Rice never lost touch with the exuberant, often witty, and always fearless voice of irrepressible vampire Lestat de Lioncourt." —BookPage "Immense and rich." —Elle "Anne Rice is the queen of sexy vampire fiction." —Cosmopolitan "Lestat is . . . an engaging character who manages to live up to his own hype." —The Boston Globe "Popular fiction of the highest order." —USA Today Review Quote Praise for Anne Rice and The Vampire Chronicles: "[Rices] undead characters are utterly alive." --The New York Times Book Review "No one writing today matches [Anne Rices] deftness with the erotic." -- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Anne Rice will live on through the ages of literature. . . . To read her is to become giddy as if spinning through the mind of time, to become lightheaded as if our blood is slowly being drained away." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Fans old and new will find this book an effusive celebration of a saga now more than forty years in the making." -- Publishers Weekly "Bloody marvelous." -- Time "Rice never lost touch with the exuberant, often witty, and always fearless voice of irrepressible vampire Lestat de Lioncourt." -- BookPage "Immense and rich." -- Elle "Anne Rice is the queen of sexy vampire fiction." -- Cosmopolitan "Lestat is . . . an engaging character who manages to live up to his own hype." -- The Boston Globe "Popular fiction of the highest order." -- USA Today Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 Im the vampire Lestat. Im six feet tall, have blue-gray eyes that sometimes appear violet, and a lean athletic build. My hair is blond and thick and hangs to my shoulders, and over the years it has become lighter so that at times it seems pure white. Ive been alive on this earth for more than two hundred fifty years and I am truly immortal, having survived any number of assaults on my person, and my own suicidal recklessness, only becoming stronger as the result. My face is square, my mouth full and sensual, my nose insignificant, and I am perhaps one of the most conventional looking of the Undead youll ever see. Almost all vampires are beautiful. They are picked for their beauty. But I have the boring appeal of a matinee idol rescued by a fierce and engaging expression, and I speak a brand of easy rapid English thats contemporary--after two centuries of accepting English as the universal language of the Undead. Why am I telling you all this, you might ask--you, the members of the Blood Communion, who know me now as the Prince. Am I not the Lestat so vividly described in Louiss florid memoir? Am I not the same Lestat who became a super rock star for a brief time in the 1980s, publicizing the secrets of our tribe in film and song? Yes, I am that person, most certainly, perhaps the only vampire known to just about every blood drinker on the planet by name and by sight. Yes, I made those rock videos that revealed our ancient parents, Akasha and Enkil, and how we might all perish if one or both of them were destroyed. Yes, I wrote other books after my autobiography; and yes, I am indeed the Prince now ruling from my Chteau in the remote mountains of France. But its been many a year since I addressed you directly, and some of you werent born when I penned my autobiography. Some of you werent Born to Darkness until very recently, and some of you might not believe in the story of the Vampire Lestat as its been related to you--or the history of how Lestat became the host to the Sacred Core of all the tribe, and then finally, released from that burden, survived as the ruler upon whom order and survival now depend. Make no mistake, the books Prince Lestat and Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis were penned by me, and all that they related has indeed happened, and those many blood drinkers described in the two books are accurately portrayed. But the time has come for me once again to address you intimately and to shape this narrative in my own inimitable and informal fashion as I seek to relate to you all that I think you should know. And the first thing which I must tell you is that I write now for you--for my fellow blood drinkers, the members of the Blood Communion--and no one else. Of course this book will fall into mortal hands. But it will be perceived as fiction, no matter how obvious it may be that it is not. All the books of the Vampire Chronicles have been received as fiction the world over, and always have been. The few mortals who interact with me in the vicinity of my ancestral home believe me to be an eccentric human who enjoys impersonating a vampire, the leader of a strange cult of like-minded vampire impersonators who gather under my roof to engage in romantic retreats from the busy modern world. This remains our greatest protection, this cynical dismissal of us as real, true monsters, in an era that just might be more dangerous to us than any other through which weve lived. But I will not dwell on the matter in this narrative. The story Im going to tell has little or nothing to do with the modern world. Its a tale as old as tale telling itself, about the struggle of individuals to find and defend their place in a timeless universe, alongside all the other children of the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. But it is important for me to say--as this story begins--that I was as resentful and confused by my human nature as Id ever been. If you do go back to my autobiography, youll likely see how much I wanted humans to believe in us, how boldly I shaped my narrative as a challenge: Come, fight us, wipe us out! There ran in my Frenchmans blood only one acceptable version of glory: making history among mortal women and men. And as I prepared for my one and only rock concert in San Francisco in the year 1984, I did dream of an immense battle, an apocalyptic confrontation to which elder blood drinkers would be awakened and drawn irresistibly, and young ones incited with fury, and the mortal world committed to stamping out our evil once and for all. Well, nothing came of that ambition. Nothing at all. The few brave scientists who insisted they had seen living proof of our existence met with personal ruin, with only a precious few being invited to join our ranks, at which point they passed into the same invisibility which protects us all. Over the years, being the rebel and the brat that I am, I created another great sensation, described in my memoir, Memnoch the Devil, and that too did invite mortal scrutiny, a scrutiny which might have seduced yet more hapless individuals to destroy their lives arguing that we were real. But that brief damage to the fabric of the reasonable world was corrected immediately by clever blood drinkers who removed all forensic evidence of us from laboratories in New York City, and within a month all the excitement stirred up by me and my Blessed Veil of Saint Veronica was over, with the relic itself gone to the crypts of the Vatican in Rome. The Talamasca, an ancient Order of Scholars, managed to obtain it after that, and subsequent to their acquiring it, the veil was destroyed. Theres a story to all that, a small one anyway, but you wont find it here. The point is--for all the fuss and bother--we remained as safe in the shadows as wed ever been. This story--to be precise--is about how we vampires of the world came together to form what I now call the Blood Communion, and how I came not only to be Prince, but to be the true ruler of the tribe. One can assume a title without really accepting it. One can be anointed a prince without reaching for the scepter. One can agree to lead without really believing in the power of oneself to do it. We all know these things to be true. And so it was with me. I became Prince because the elders of our tribe wanted me to do it. I possessed something of a charismatic ease with the idea, which others did not share. But I did not really examine what I was doing when I accepted the title, or commit to it. Instead, I clung to a selfish passivity in the matter, assuming that at any moment I might tire of the entire enterprise and walk away. After all, I was still invisible and insignificant, an outcast, a monster, a predatory demon, Cain the slayer of his brothers and sisters, a phantom pilgrim on a spiritual journey so narrowly defined by my vampire existence that whatever I discovered would never be of relevance to anybody, except as poetry, as metaphor, as fiction, and I should take comfort in that fact. Oh, I enjoy being the Prince, dont get me wrong. I loved the rapid and totally egregious restoration of my ancestral Chteau and the little village which lay below it on the narrow mountain road that led to nowhere--and it was an undoubted pleasure to see the great hall filled each evening with preternatural musicians and dancers, flashing exquisite white skin, shimmering hair, costumes of extraordinary richness, and countless jewels. One and all of the Undead were and are now most welcome under my roof. The house has innumerable salons through which you can wander, rooms in which you might settle to watch films on giant flat screens, and libraries in which you might meditate in silence or read. Beneath it are crypts that have been expanded to hold perhaps the entire tribe in darkness and safety, even were the Chteau itself attacked in the daylight hours and burnt over our heads. I like all this. I like welcoming everyone. I like taking the young fledglings in hand and welcoming them to our closets from which they can take any clothing they need or desire. I like watching them shed their rags and burn them in one of the many fireplaces. I like hearing everywhere around me the soft uneven rumble of preternatural voices in conversation, even argument, and also the low, vibrant rhythm of preternatural thoughts. But who am I to rule others? I was anointed the Brat Prince by Marius before I ever set foot on that rock music stage decades ago, and a brat I most surely was. Marius had come up with that little label for me when he realized I was revealing to the Vampire World all the secrets hed bound me under penalty of destruction to keep. And a legion of others have picked up the title, and they use it as easily now as the simple appellation Prince. Its no secret to the elders far and wide that Ive never bent the knee to any authority ever, that I smashed up the coven of the Children of Satan when I was taken prisoner by it in the 1700s, and that I broke even the most informal rules with my rock music adventure, and deserved a good deal of the condemnation for recklessness that I received. I didnt bow to Memnoch either. And I didnt bow to God Incarnate, who appeared to me in the airy spiritual realm into which Memnoch dragged me, all the way back to the narrow dusty road to Calvary in the city of ancient Jerusalem. And having given short shrift to every being who had ever tried to control me, I seemed a most unlikely person to undertake the monarchy of the Undead. But as this story begins, I had accepted it. I had accepted it truly and completely and for one sim Details ISBN0525433929 Author Anne Rice Pages 272 Series Vampire Chronicles Language English Year 2019 ISBN-10 0525433929 ISBN-13 9780525433927 Format Paperback Short Title Blood Communion Subtitle A Tale of Prince Lestat Series Number 13 Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-08-20 NZ Release Date 2019-08-20 US Release Date 2019-08-20 Place of Publication New York UK Release Date 1900-01-01 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2019-08-20 Imprint Anchor Books DEWEY 813.54 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 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