Episode 61 – Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
HAPPY HALLOWEEN to those who celebrate! We’re continuing our Halloween tradition by bringing you another Anne Rice jam with Special Guest Dr. Claire! Last year we covered The Vampire Lestat and you should totally go back and listen to that one too. This time we didn’t go for three hours – two and a half hours is not three hours. We got off the rails because quite frankly this book never even got on the rails. This book is a speedboat trying to use the train tracks. That’s our excuse here.
The Queen of the Damned is, we all agreed, where the Vampire Chronicles went off the rails. It gets shaggy. It makes… somewhere south of narrative sense. It theoretically starts off where The Vampire Lestat leaves off (so if you want to know and you haven’t read either, start with last year’s podcast) but it actually takes half a book to get there. It has a bunch of ancient vampires and some baby vampires. It has crazy vampire mythology. It has some seriously dicey understandings of the developing world. It’s bananas. Meet Akasha! She’s the oldest vampire! She has dumb ideas! She’s burning all the vampires. She burns most of them but the ones she doesn’t burn talk a lot! Then a bog witch shows up and yanks her head clean off! End of book. See, Anne? That didn’t need to be five hundred pages!
Content warnings – it’s a vampire book so it’s got all sorts of nonconsensual stuff going on but, like, even more so. It has people who Rice thinks are asexual because she doesn’t understand the term. It has grooming. It has bananas racism.
And as promised, here are some amazing covers for this book:
Spanish! Simple but I dig it!
Bulgarian! Now we’re talking!
Italian! I feel like this is just one of those oddball candidates for the Italian legislative body?
Hungarian! Yes! (I feel any cover with any effort for this book is frankly gonna be my jam.
Finnish – this is low effort but I still love it?
Okay, no, Danish. That’s just Cher.
Ahahahah France never stop wait actually please stop don’t tell me you’ve never seen boobs before France because I’ve been to you and I know you have!
Uh I hate to impugn Romanian knowledge about vampires but I believe this is actually a werewolf?
Sexy Goth Girls are eternal, Italy.
Werk again, Finland!
Again, this is just Cher, France, and you are not fooling anybody.
The covers to 11 issues of Innovation’s 12-part comic book adaption of Queen of the Damned. The company went out of business before the final issue was published.
