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Title: The Vampire Chronicles #4 The Tale of the Body Thief
Score:
Author: Anne Rice
Rating: Not available
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Review of The Vampire Chronicles #4 The Tale of the Body Thief

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Comments for The Vampire Chronicles #4 The Tale of the Body Thief

• Posted on 2009-09-20
  Classic
  
  At 4.5/5 stars, this book is a wonderful installment to the Vampire Chronicles. Aside the new tales of the vampires (Armand, Vittorio, Pandora), this is the last REALLY good book in the Vampire Chronicles. After the thrilling tale of the Queen of the Damned, this book provides a good continuation of Lestat's adventures. Put together (Interview, Lestat, Queen of the Damned, and this book), they make for a very solid tetralogy and represent Ms. Rice's best work.
  
  It's really too bad that after this she decided to concentrate more on religion with Memnoch the Devil. If she had written more books true to Lestat's original character with less religious twaddle, the rest of the Vampire Chronicles would have remained solid gold.
  
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• Posted on 2009-09-01
  Don't Bother
  
  If you like the character Lestat, I wouldn't recommend reading this novel. He proves in a rather spectacular fashion that he is not just a whiny, pathetic, sniveling child; he is a fool as well.
  
  He spends a great deal of the novel whining, which seems to be a given for Lestat. Like a child who has grown tired of a toy, he is tired of his immortal life and even attempts suicide by going out into the Gobi Desert. Being a ludicrously godlike and invulnerable character he of course does not die, but instead crawls back to David Talbot to be nursed back to health.
  
  He then falls into an incredibly obvious trap that the reader sees coming from a mile away, but can do nothing but groan as he walks into it with his eyes open. Readers of the previous novels involving him will be astounded at how idiotic he proves to be. The rest of the novel is spent on a wild goose chase to get his body back that finally plays out on a cruise ship, of all places. Lestat concludes by forcibly turning David into a vampire (after already having raped a girl while human) and reuniting with Louis. While many seemed to be surprised by the "rape" quality of this scene, I wasn't expecting nothing better of a character such as Lestat. (Or a writer such as Rice, for that matter.)
  
  This novel suffers from the same flaws that all of Rice's novels (save Interview with the Vampire) do. It is slow and dragging in many places, and fails to engage the reader for most of the story. Rice's utter infatuation with Lestat is as prominent as ever; disgustingly so at some points. It would benefit tremendously from being told in the third person so that Rice is separated from her beloved Lestat, who acts for the most part as a self-insert and a mouthpiece for her. The PoV only serves to make it easier for Rice to ramble on and on with the most obnoxious drivel that you can imagine.
  
  If you are contemplating whether to read on in the Vampire Chronicles series, don't. Interview with the Vampire is great and The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned have their moments, but the others aren't worth it. Rice is excessively fond of hearing herself talk through Lestat, and will bore you to tears.
  
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• Posted on 2009-05-25
  The Last Good Book in the Series
  
  Though Tale of the Body Thief did not live up to its three predecessors it was still a novel I would place among my favorites. It is hard to deny Anne Rice's exquisite writing talent and her ability to weave the net of her tale so tightly that the reader finds themselves trapped within it, unable to set the book down. In my opinion this was that last good novel in the Vampire Chronicles series. As I'm sure most fans know Anne Rice, regrettably, made the choice to rejoin the Catholic Church which for me spoiled her later writings. I was intrigued by Lestat's return to a human body though I was also endlessly annoyed by the fact that some lunatic was cavorting around in his beautiful immortal body! I also found in the novel that I rather liked David, I was glad that he became Lestat's friend and confidant even more than he had been previously. Tale of the Body Thief displays all of the virtues of the previous three novels and I love it but it somehow falls short in a way that I cannot quite explain. However, I highly recommend it to Anne Rice fans!
  
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• Posted on 2009-02-06
  A Rich and Engaging Entertainment
  
  In this book, Anne Rice lets loose a wild streak of exuberant and improbable invention, dovetailed with rich observation of the here and now. It is a dazzling display of her volcanic, seemingly unstobbable ability to convincingly invent; one would call it showing off if it were not so consistently entertaining and involving. And it works. As in Faulkner's tour d'force As I Lay Dying, wherein the dead speak, one simply accepts all, driven by the demand to read on.
  
  The Vampire Lestat, as we have known all along, has a problem. He wants to connect back with the human race, not just feed off it. He is deeply sensual, and his French boyhood 200 years ago was but a prefigurement of the modern world which he can only observe from a distance, never enter. Now this predicament is never stated explicitly by the writer, who is too shrewd for that. For one thing, it would give away the game since obviously, Lestat could only be a projection of a real modern sensibility--namely her own. So she creates this race course, so to speak, for Lestat to attempt to do all he cannot do, to love a few real human beings he will not kill, and ultimately to meet a "body thief" and concoct a deal to exchange bodies, for a time.
  
  Narratively speaking of course, all Rice has done is up the ante -- way up -- a vampire as protagonist is improbable enough, but now this. Nevertheless like a magician showing off, building up from a rabbit in a hat to sawing a woman in half, the improbabilities heap on and on and the sheer power of the writing itself carries it all along. It is a superb performance. Certain passages including descriptions of modern New Orleans, the halls and bars of the QE2, the pathos of Lestat's aging human friend David, and the penultimate scene -- where the "body thief" finally takes Lestat's form in a Georgetown flat & clumsily takes off -- are as fine as Anne Rice ever gets. As usual, her generosity with her natural gifts is breath taking. The uncanny thing, as always, is her unbelievable ability to fully imagine something from the inside out, not miss a detail in converting it into an everday mundane reality we can accept.
  
  Of course, there must be more than sheer inventiveness to make this work. Rice's secret is that her race horse, Lestat, is a strong projection of a modern Everyman at heart -- perpetually young, very fashion conscious, driven to a rapacity for experience by a degree of personal freedom unknown in history, intellectually curious, hungry to plumb the mysteries of God & the universe but doubtful, materially fleshbound in his own peculiar, individual way, both amoral and guilt-ridden all at once. When he finally reaches a judgment about any other character we automatically share it.
  
  The free narrative strategy here will startle some, as the first 2 Vampire novels especially were very conventionally tight as a drum. In book 3, Queen of the Damned, the opener was a wild ride of this nature, but the book quickly cooled down into ancient historical arcana. True, this book is a little bit of "trying out on paper" -- as far as plot line and organization goes -- but that doesn't mean its a throwaway. Ultimately, it is one of the most entertaining and carefully observed books in the series -- writing for writings' sake that pays back to the penny.
  
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• Posted on 2009-01-18
  This Is When
  
  Sadly, this novel and Taltos mark the point where Anne Rice "jumped the shark". "The Witching Hour" and "Queen of the Damned" were her last two good novels, and they were great. Everything afterwards, including "Tales of the Body Thief" have the hallmarks of poor writing, obviously pumped out as quickly as possible to make money, and confused theology.
  
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