Pandora (New Tales of the Vampires)

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Anne Rice fans will greet Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires, the first of her new vampire chronicles, as hungrily as the Fang Gang facing a fresh new neck. Our heroine, Pandora, a senator's daughter in Augustus Caesar's day, flees to Antioch when her family gets killed and discovers the antidote to stern Roman rationalism in the occult wisdom of the East. "Something attacked my reason," Pandora writes. "The very thing the Roman Emperors had so feared in Egyptian cults and Oriental cults swept over me: mystery and emotion which claim a superiority to reason and law."

Pandora gets her sexy vampire initiation at the fangs of handsome Marius (who later inducted Rice's famed vampire Lestat). Pandora tells how a nice Roman girl became a vampire in modern Paris, but mostly the book celebrates the sights and sounds (and philosophical bloodlettings) of the classical world. Pandora is more like Robert Graves's sublime I, Claudius than Rice's The Complete Vampire Chronicles.

Yet Pandora is a logical extension of Rice's work, and Pandora is a combination of her past vampire heroes and the nakedly, horrifyingly autobiographical heroine of Rice's 1997 novel Violin. Now, Violin is remarkably messy, but it captures the volcanic passion that erupts in her best work--Rice calls it "a study in pain." Pandora is really a dramatized debate between passion and reason, which Pandora calls "male reason." She teases her vampire mentor: "Marius guarded his delicate rationality as a Vestal Virgin guards a sacred flame. If ever any ecstatic emotion took hold of me, he [would] tell me in no uncertain terms that it was irrational, irrational, irrational!" (To hear how close Pandora's voice is to her passionate creator, listen to the 1997 audiocassette Interview with Anne Rice.)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Anne Rice, creator of the Vampire Lestat, the Mayfair witches, and the fantastic worlds they inhabit, now gives us the first in a series of novels linked together by the fledgling vampire David Talbot, who has set out to become a chronicler. We are in Paris, the time is now. In a crowded cafe, David meets Pandora. She is 2,000 years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to write for him the story of her life -- from her mortal girlhood in the peaceful Rome of Caesar Augustus through her periolous journey toward the vampire Marius, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift, and through their two centuries together before they are tragically lost to each other.

FROM THE CRITICS

Peter Kurth

Pandora, the latest offering in Anne Rice's wildly popular "Vampire Chronicles," has been packaged by her publisher in the form of a missal or a prayer book, printed on the finest paper in "Monotype Dante," a typeface "modeled on the Aldine type used for Pietro Cardinal Bembo's treatise De Aetna in 1495," according to the backnotes. The jacket is bordered by a detail from a 16th century Italian manuscript by Auguste Racinet, and the frontispiece is an eighth century rendering of "the scribe Ezra rewriting the sacred records." All this is appropriate to Pandora's plot, which knows no fixed time, place or consistent vernacular, and to Rice herself, who ranges all over the historical, philosophical and supernatural map in every book she writes. She's the Madame Blavatsky of our time, roaming through myth and arcane wisdom while keeping her eye sharply fixed on contemporary sensibilities.

If you've never read Rice before, Pandora may not be the best place to start, with its constant references to her earlier sagas and its more or less routine invocation of vampires and their ways. It's a quirky little book, the first-person narrative of a Roman noblewoman from the period of Caesar Augustus, who, vampirized, has wandered the earth for 2000 years in search of blood and the meaning of life. The novel is told in the form of an autobiographical letter from Pandora -- her name used to be Lydia until the Emperor Tiberius slaughtered her family and she was forced to flee to Antioch, and later Egypt, under a new identity -- to David Talbot, an intermittent figure in other Rice novels who has now become a vampire himself. (Editor's note: While Salon's editor, David Talbot, often works suspiciously late, he is of no apparent relation to Rice's "David Talbot.") Like all of Rice's soulful demons, Talbot is looking for The Truth. "I am a miracle unto myself," he tells Pandora. "I am immortal, and I want to learn about us! You have a tale to tell, you are ancient, and deeply broken."

With that in mind, Pandora recounts her weary journey, focusing on her relations with Marius, the Roman renegade she had loved as a girl and who, later, was the first man to suck her blood: "Marius taught me to hunt, to catch the evildoer only, and to kill without pain, enwrapping the soul of my victim in sweet visions or allowing the soul to illuminate its own death with a cascade of fantasies which I must not judge, but only devour, like the blood." In and out of the story are some of Rice's familiar standbys, "Mekare," "Maharet," "Akasha" and, of course, the vampire Lestat, currently lying comatose in a basement in New Orleans. You don't need to know the details, and Rice never pauses to relate them. It would be easy to make fun of her almighty portentousness, which runs through Pandora like a river of hemoglobin. But you'd be wrong to leave it there, because she writes fearlessly, and she's a storyteller of authentic power. Pandora herself is one of Rice's deftest and warmest creations, in fact, a lady vampire with a lock on irony. You can forgive all the smoke and the hocus-pocus -- "First, you must understand that Mother Isis forgives anything" -- in favor of a sly and wacky ride through time. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Although Rice bid goodbye to the vampire Lestat in Memnoch the Devil, her fifth novel in "The Vampire Chronicles", she has not abandoned vampires altogether. Two installments are planned this year in her "New Tales of the Vampires" series, and in the first of these, the ancient vampire Pandora tells her story. Urged on by David Talbot -- fledgling vampire, self-appointed chronicler and former psychic detective -- Pandora documents in sophisticated detail her pre-vampire existence as the privileged daughter of a Roman senator. She's a curious character, first introduced in The Queen of the Damned, in which Marius described her as the Greek courtesan who seduced him into making her a vampire and helped him care for the vampire progenitors until strife forced them apart. Here, Pandora herself sets the record straight. Born early in Augustus's reign, the educated, spirited Pandora was no courtesan -- though we do see her challenge the sexual mores of her moment. When Tiberius brings chaos to Rome, and dishonor and death to Pandora's family, she goes to Antioch and tries to solve the mystery of her compelling blood dreams about Egypt. There, she reunites with her childhood crush, Marius, and learns from him what it means to be a vampire. Along the way, we find little of Rice's trademark eroticism, but Pandora has long been one of her more elusive characters, so fans will relish this vivid rendering of her life and times.

Library Journal

In Queen of the Damned, the third volume of Rice's "Vampire Chronicles," readers were introduced to the psychologically wounded immortal Pandora, who roused herself long enough to rescue her lover, Marius. In this first novel of a new series, Pandora tells fledgling vampire David Talbot the story of her mortal life as a woman of privilege in the Rome of Augustus Caesar. When Tiberius ascends the throne, most of Pandora's family is murdered, but she manages to escape to the city of Antioch. There her interest in the cult of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis is reawakend. At the same time, Pandora suffers from nightmares of blood drinking and torture. Also in Antioch is Marius, a recent initiate into the world of the vampire. He knows that Pandora is being led to this same terrible fate, which he desperately wants to prevent. Throughout, Rice interjects tantalizing bits of the vampiric history and horrors that pervade her earlier books. Although Pandora's story has enough substance to be read and enjoyed on its own, those already familiar with the Chronicles will find added insight to the characters of Pandora and Marius. For all fiction collections.

Library Journal

In Queen of the Damned, the third volume of Rice's "Vampire Chronicles," readers were introduced to the psychologically wounded immortal Pandora, who roused herself long enough to rescue her lover, Marius. In this first novel of a new series, Pandora tells fledgling vampire David Talbot the story of her mortal life as a woman of privilege in the Rome of Augustus Caesar. When Tiberius ascends the throne, most of Pandora's family is murdered, but she manages to escape to the city of Antioch. There her interest in the cult of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis is reawakend. At the same time, Pandora suffers from nightmares of blood drinking and torture. Also in Antioch is Marius, a recent initiate into the world of the vampire. He knows that Pandora is being led to this same terrible fate, which he desperately wants to prevent. Throughout, Rice interjects tantalizing bits of the vampiric history and horrors that pervade her earlier books. Although Pandora's story has enough substance to be read and enjoyed on its own, those already familiar with the Chronicles will find added insight to the characters of Pandora and Marius. For all fiction collections.

NY Times Book Review

Eerily vibrant. . . . The title character is a highborn woman of Augustan Rome who later names herself after the Pandora of mythology, opening her own box of surprises. Sitting in a modern-day Paris cafe in the aftermath of a fresh kill, the vampire Pandora accepts the challenge of recounting her history and immediately sets to work, filling the blank pages of an elegant leatherbound notebook. . . . A wealth of narrative twists and period detail.Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

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