By now, Anne Rice has well established her methods of operation for her vampire novels. There will be darkness; there will be a great deal of angst. Soon after there will be ruminations on the nature of the vampire and on the state of the vampire's soul. There will be, always, much thought given to the idea of evil, to the vampire's place in the pantheon of evil. There will be soul searching and tragedy, inner agony, personal demons. And, as ever, there will be her untouchable, outrageous, gorgeous, and wickedly naughty vampires.
It is her strength, making the supernatural as compelling and lavish as she does, making her novels, with their antebellum façades and grand, overdone gothicness as fun as they often are. But the challenge for her is to make something more than a repetition of her opulent clichés. In Merrick, her newest novel, she does not entirely succeed.
Rice never quite manages to transcend that dusty lushness of hers, but that's what makes Merrick as solidly satisfying as most of her novels. You realize, as you're reading, what it is you expect from Rice. And whether you love her ironically and with a grain of salt, or with the same full-blown love that Rice harbors for her own characters, you are always given what you expect. And as always, you cannot help but be pleased when you get it, as lavish as ever.
It is clear, though, that in Merrick, Rice is conspiring to give fans even more than they expect. Here we have the two loves of Rice's literary life colliding -- to what should be shrieking delight from long-time fans. The author is merging her old love of those Mayfair witches, brought to a dizzyingly unsatisfying conclusion in the Witch Chronicles, with her passion for her vampires.
At its heart, the novel is the tale of a Mayfair witch being drawn abruptly into the vampires' world. And from there, any fan of Rice can immediately sketch out the ending. Merrick Mayfair is as impossibly gorgeous, as sensuous as the vampires, and as deeply mysterious and supernatural. She is a witch of astonishing powers -- a caller of ghosts, a controller of spirits. A femme de couleur libre, she is a practitioner of Voodoo and the magical arts -- and a controller who can make even a vampire bend to her will. She is drawn as compellingly flawed and immoral -- another of the seductive evildoers of which Anne Rice is so fond.
She is brought into the story as something of a lost love of David Talbot's -- that former head of the Talamasca, now beautiful vampire. As a creature of the supernatural herself, she is one of the few mortals who could handle this strangeness intruding into her life. And it is indeed a strangeness that these vampires bring to her. They ask Merrick to call up the soul of Claudia: the long-dead vampire who is Louis' obsession.
And so Louis, that beautiful and haunted protagonist of Rice's very first vampire novel, Interview with the Vampire, finally emerges from the long shadow of Rice's "dark lover" Lestat, and becomes a major character once more. His humanish vulnerability and his physical appeal are suddenly drawn once again in vivid colors. Rice had often pushed this first, pioneer vampire of hers into the background as her more flamboyant characters had taken hold. Towing Louis back into the light of the plot and making him, once more, a pivotal character gives the novel a feeling of both nostalgia and freshness. The reader is taken back to the beginning of the series, to ground laid two decades ago, now revisited with fresh eyes.
From there, the novel is something of a quest, a Tolkien-like trek through a series of obstacles, before the goal is reached. Rice pulls her characters through a jungle, through the scheming of malevolent ghosts and the labyrinths of trust and betrayal in which she specializes.
The novel covers familiar Rice territory, but in wedding her two series -- her witches and her more famous vampires -- she clearly means to breathe new life into a line of novels that had begun to flounder, lost in the usual formulas, those Anne Rice clichés. The jungles of Brazil, les mystères of Voodoo that she had begun to flirt with in earlier novels become intertwined intimately with the plot. Ghosts become substantial, shades from the past break into the vampires' world.
And so, subtly, Rice's world of vampires is shifted, ornamented, embroidered even more opulently with the trappings of Voodoo and the rituals of superstition, the exotic textures of the jungles.
But underpinning all of this is still Anne Rice's fascination with her beautiful creatures, her infatuation with the supernatural and the dark -- a crush almost like that of a gothpunk teenager lighting her first Wiccan candle. Certainly Rice can be heavy handed and spooky to the point of silliness; she can just try too hard, sometimes, and take herself far too seriously. But Merrick represents Rice at her most even-handed.
For fans, Merrick is old territory with splashes of the new. But there's still enough of the old Anne Rice style to satisfy any long-term reader. Staying true to her obsessions, Rice delivers a solid, satisfying read.
Jen Larsen is a writer and editor who takes offense when you suggest that she lives in New Jersey, rather than the New York Metropolitan area. Her fiction and poetry has been published on Clean Sheets and in numerous small print journals. Her Web site, which contains mostly non-fictional non fiction, is om mani padme hum.