Prince Lestat by Anne Rice, book review: Modern life just sucks

Lestat is stressed.

Things aren’t what they were in the vampire world. And we’re not talking about Twilight here. He’s finding modern life something of a chore. It’s been more than a decade since Anne Rice last wrote a Vampire Chronicles novel, and during that time she has returned to the Catholic church to write novels such as Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, then renounced organised religion a second time.

Now her “Brat Prince” is back, and he’s struggling with 21st-century undeadness. His pals in the vampire world now have a radio phone-in show, broadcast from a palatial home on New York’s Upper East Side. They’re stirring things up by talking to all sorts of ne’er-do-wells from all over the world, while the New York art scene takes it all as a magnificent feat of performance art. Meanwhile, Lestat is struggling with technology: “I have to learn how to send emails all over again every couple of years.” And everyone now has iPhone cameras which means that taking a discreet nibble on a human in a dark alleyway is nothing like as easy as it was in 18th-century Paris.

To top it all off, a mysterious being named the Voice is inciting immense violence in the Vampire community against their own. Basically, it’s time for Lestat to get a grip: his old friends gather and persuade him that the community needs a leader, a strategy and a future. Despite his evident ennui at the half-life he is stuck with, there is just enough of the iconic Lestat left in there to get a fresh novel from him. But it’s a close run thing.

Rice now has such a huge catalogue of characters and biographies for them that far too much of the early part of the novel is spent getting the reader up to speed, but Lestat remains a storyteller with a distinct and charming tone. It’s a blessed relief to be free from the Mormon drudgery of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, and there are flashes of humour and brilliance here.

But Anne Rice’s florid writing style is far from reliable. It can veer into the howlingly old-fashioned. There are references to big name label suits that could be vintage Bret Easton Ellis, and the fact that the novel is in part dedicated to Jon Bon Jovi, whom she recently declared to be “The Vampire Lestat Incarnate”, doesn’t exactly add a 21st-century urgency to proceedings. Rice is a charismatic and passionate storyteller, but her prose is ultimately let down by the fact that if your leading man is one of the undead, you can’t have him age as you do.