reference

I bought this book having already read each of the vampire chronicles, as well as several of the "New Tales of the Vampires". It was probably a good thing too, as it's quite possible that if you haven't read all the books, the Companion will give away some very important plot twists.

However, the book is obviously meant as a guide and reference point for people who are already very familiar with Rice's vampires, and not for people who are too lazy to read the books. A mind-bendingly comprehensive "encyclopedia" of everything you could possibly want to know about anything to do with the first 5 vampire chronicles.

This book is made even stronger by the fact that it was written in conjunction with Anne Rice, and as such contains many asides and comments from her on the development of her characters, how she feels about them, and of course, the much-publicised parallels between the child vampire Claudia and her own daughter, who died of leukaemia at the age of 5.

While there are many people who think Rice is extremely long-winded and a trifle strange to boot, those of us who thoroughly enjoy her fantastic novels and seductive characters will wonder how we ever made do without the excellent Vampire Companion.

Being a fan of Anne Rice and having read a couple of her books I wanted to know more about the characters and other details in her novels. This book in question, i.e., The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's the Vampire Chronicles By Katherine Ramsland, Anne Vampire Chronicles Rice does fulfill this need. It starts out with a well-developed table of contents; however, it does lack an index which makes searching for a term quite arduous and therefore a bit time consuming. The acknowledgement and the introduction are very well written and are very easy to read. The entries themselves are also well written, e.g., that of the bio on Lestat.

"The Vampire Companion" is a very exhaustive encyclopedia of most of the terms, characters, locations, and events in the Vampire Chronicles series. It only covers the first five books in this series, though ("Interview With the Vampire", "The Vampire Lestat", "The Queen of the Damned", "The Tale of the Body Thief", and "Memnoch the Devil"), which may bother more die hard Vampire fans. Information on the other four books ("The Vampire Armand", "Merrick", "Blood and Gold", and "Blackwood Farm") is obviously missing since they were published after this book.

Just about everything's included in this mammoth 500+-paged book: maps, illustrations and photos, bits of Anne Rice information, a time line, in-depth character biographies, etc. Even the unpublished short story of "Interview With the Vampire" is included, which originated the novel one year later.

If you're an Anne Rice fan--and especially if you enjoyed the Vampire Chronicles--then I highly recommend this official reference guide to her popular vampire series, even though it only covers half the books in the series. (Hopefully, there will be another revised edition published soon.) But for what it does cover, "The Vampire Companion" is very thorough and worthwhile to Vampire fans. This is certainly a book worth owning, since it answers just about every question you've ever had about this series and then some.

Also recommended: Katherine Ramsland's "The Witches' Companion."