Blood and Gold: 8 (Vampire Chronicles) - Hardcover

Rice, Professor Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679454497 ISBN 13: 9780679454496

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2001

Synopsis

The Vampire Chronicles continue with Anne Rice's spellbinding new novel, in which the great vampire Marius returns.

The golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millennia, once mentor to The Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious foe of the Evil Doer, reveals in his own intense yet inti-
mate voice the secrets of his two-thousand-year existence.

Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, kidnapped and made a "blood god" by the Druids, Marius becomes the embittered protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the supernatural race resides.

We follow him through his heartbreaking abandonment of the vampire Pandora. Through him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine and the horrific sack of the Eternal City itself at the hands of the Visigoths.

Bravely, Marius seeks a new civilization in the midst of glittering Constantinople, only to meet with the blood drinker Eudoxia. We see him ultimately returning to his beloved Italy, where after the horrors of the Black Death, he is restored by the beauty of the Renaissance. We see him become a painter living dangerously
yet happily among mortals, giving his heart to the great Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the mysterious young apprentice Armand.

Moving from Rome to Florence, Venice, and Dresden, and to the English castle of the secret scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel reaches its dramatic finale in our own time, deep in the jungle where Marius, having told his life story, seeks some measure of justice from the oldest vampires in the world.

About this title

Review:

With Blood and Gold, Anne Rice is firing on all cylinders again, producing the kind of heady mix that distinguishes her best work: a bizarre mélange of gothic horror, overripe romanticism and a genuinely poetic vision that is very much her own. This latest vampire novel boasts all the Rice specialities, notably a moody, patrician vampire protagonist.

Marius, from a noble family (and a distinguished scholar), is one of the oldest of all vampires, his origins lost in the mist of ancient Rome, in the time of the Emperor Augustus. But all of his encounters over the centuries have not prepared him for his meeting in the present day with a sinister being of snow and ice. The northern vampire Thorne is seeking Maharet, his "maker", a centuries-old Egyptian vampire queen whose unbreakable hold over him rests in chains made of her red hair. As the Visigoths looted and pillaged, Marius looked on; he strode the decadence of the Roman empire, still seeking his lost love Pandora, but was later beguiled by Renaissance beauty Bianca, and the boy Amadeo. Rice, as usual, intertwines her diverse and complex narratives, keeping a massive cast of characters always alive for the reader. But the emphasis here is on the brilliantly created Marius, in thrall to Pandora and his alter ego Mael. As Rice conjures him, Marius may be the most distinctive protagonist in all her fiction. Throughout the seven volumes of the Vampire Chronicles, and most notably in such recent books as Memnoch the Devil and Merrick, Rice showed that she would never be content to repeat herself. Blood and Gold is further evidence of her willingness to tackle new areas in her colossal vampiric mythos.--Barry Forshaw

Review:

"Tantalizing . . . Sustains its impact from start to finish."
-USA Today

"A MARVELOUS ADVENTURE . . . Rice continues to be a fascinating, immensely talented writer; she's taking risks that few other popular authors would even contemplate. Readers . . . will be enthralled."
-The Dallas Morning News

"DIFFICULT TO PUT DOWN. This is perhaps, the finest Vampire Chronicle [Rice] has penned."
-Lambda Book Report

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0679454497
• ISBN 13: 9780679454496
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480