By Anne Rice
3.8
The first in a new series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead, is now available from Anne Rice, the creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches, and the amazing worlds they inhabit.The novel opens in pres... ent-day Paris in a crowded café, where David meets Pandora. She is a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever created by the great Marius, and she is two thousand years old. David persuades her to tell her life story. Pandora begins to tell her mesmerizing story, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion. She transports us back to her mortal youth in the world of Caesar Augustus, as depicted by Ovid and Petronius in their works. Pandora meets and falls in love with Marius, who is handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, and still mortal. This is the Rome she has to flee for fear of being assassinated by conspirators plotting the city's takeover. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she will be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they embark on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.
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Ballantine books
Dec 26, 1998
9780345422385
Mass Market Paperback
English
368
Pandora
383 Pages
And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.
You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.
First sheaf in a new series by Rice, picking up where The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) left off and telling of 2,000-year-old Pandora, who is seduced in Paris by newly-fanged David Talbot, an elderly scholar, into writing her memoirs.
But it wouldn't hurt, and readers who haven't read the earlier books will likely want to read them after reading Pandora.
(CNN) -- Anne Rice's vampires have served her well, bringing to (undead) life a fully-realized world of the supernatural.
In it, newly initiated vampire David Talbot—a former member of the Talamasca Society, an organization that collects tales of the supernatural—has persuaded the ancient, enigmatic Pandora to write the story of how the elder vampire Marius came to bestow the Dark Gift of immortality upon her more t...
