Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Even when she doesn’t seem to mean it, Anne Rice’s writing is luscious. If she describes places, you ache to visit them. Strangely, this is true even when those places are as familiar as New Orleans, or as unreal as the kingdoms in her Beauty series. I consider this a rare enough gift, but she can also do the same for people. Once a character of hers gets under your skin, they feel like real people, and you miss them once they’ve gone.

Lestat, of course, is the best known of these. Fitting I suppose, that a vampire should have such a magnetic personality, and I loved the entire series. Aside from Bram Stoker, who deserves a lot of credit for the whole vampire mythos, Anne Rice is the one to read if you are wanting to read a good vampire novel. Of course, she has plenty of those to choose from, my personal favorites being Pandora and Violin.

I really can’t say anything against any of these books, and I wouldn’t want to, but I have to admit, they aren’t my favorite Anne Rice novels. Yes, I’ve read the entire Beauty series, which quite honestly is far better than Fifty Shades of Grey, and I enjoyed them, but they still aren’t the ones that I keep coming back to reread.

My all-time favorites are actually two of her less wildly popular works. Not that they weren’t best sellers, they just aren’t what people think of first when they think of Anne Rice. I read the Mummy in one sitting, years ago, on a night when I should have been sleeping. I spent the rest of the day in a book-hangover, but it was well worth it. Every few years, I have to go back and read it again. Given that I have extremely limited time, that is high praise indeed.

Still, the very best of the bunch, as far as my tastes go, is Servant of the Bones. I fell in love with Azriel, in a way that only rarely happens. Beautiful and flawed, powerful and damaged, I find I can’t go a year without missing him enough to read the novel yet again.

In one of our many moves, I lost my treasured copy of the book. True, it had become somewhat ragged, as most loved things are, but I really missed it.

To put this into perspective, we are a family of bibliophiles. Practically every wall space in my home has bookshelves. There are books in all of our cars, books in every room in the house, and I never leave home without at least two. I own hundreds of books, some of them far more technically valuable.

Still, I missed this single lost book terribly. I missed Azriel.

The hunt to replace it led me to several more of her works, including The Mummy, as well as the largest used bookstore I’ve ever seen. Once I managed to find Azriel again, I bought two copies, just in case.

Cheers,

Michelle