Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Tired of the same old vampires? Check out Anne Rice's new race of undead bloodsuckers, independent of the Lestat series. Her alterna-vamp books began with Pandora, but the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, Vittorio, is truly a new beginning--a more controlled story and probably the best of her last half-dozen books.

Rice has called Vittorio her vampire version of Romeo and Juliet. The hunky Vittorio is sweet 16 and "incalculably rich" in 15th-century Italy, the epoch of the Medicis and Vittorio's favorite painter, madly passionate Filippo Lippi. Florence is to Vittorio what New Orleans is to Interview with the Vampire.

One night, Vittorio's family is butchered by vampires. The gorgeous Ursula spares Vittorio to make him her reluctant undying sweetheart. Ursula's ravishings of Vittorio recall the erotica Rice wrote under her own name and the pen names Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure.

Vittorio flees to the creepy town of Santa Maddalana, which has made a pact to sacrifice its young to Lord Florian's vampire horde. Vittorio is bent on revenge as he invades the eerie Court of the Ruby Grail (i.e. blood), as angry with the child-sacrificing humans as he is with Florian's fang gangsters. Torn between lust, murderous rage, and vampire thirst, Vittorio is one interestingly troubled soul.

Rice urges readers to enter Vittorio's world by reading the sources she embroiders, Fra Filippo Lippi and Public Life in Renaissance Florence, and to get a feel for the scary communion Vittorio sees in the Court of the Ruby Grail by listening to All Souls' Vespers. --Tim Appelo

From Library Journal

In Rice's latest, Vittorio tells of his human life and the dramatic events that led him to join the ranks of the undead. He is 16, living the privileged life of the nobility in Renaissance Italy, when a host of vampires savagely attacks his family. His parents, brother, and sister are ruthlessly murdered, but Vittorio has caught the eye of the beautiful vampiress Ursula and is spared. Eventually, Vittorio has his revenge on the demons who have destroyed his loved ones, but he pays a terrible price—part of which is that he must become a vampire himself. In addition to Rice's trademark sensuality, a strong current of Christian philosophy drives the plot. This is the second book after Pandora (LJ 3/1/98) in Rice's "New Tales of the Vampires" series, and it is told in the rhythmic, evocative prose of her best works.

—Patricia Altner, Information Seekers, Bowie, MD

Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Elegant & sumptuous, and as enjoyable as anything she has written...she provides a vivid picture of Florence in its Golden Age using the sumptuous paintings and architecture of the time as a glorious backdrop to her macabre tale." -- Booklist

From the Inside Flap

With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of Vittorio, a vampire in the Italian Age of Gold.

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures--a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power.

In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of vengeance, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue.

Against a backdrop of the wonders--both sacred and profane--and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.