The Vampire Armand is fatally flawed, and considering the protagonist is immortal, that’s quite a dilemma. I look forward to every new release by Anne Rice, and enjoyed Pandora, her last release in her vampire series. However, she hasn’t written a keeper for me since Taltos (one of her Mayfair Witch series), and hasn’t written a vampire keeper since Queen of the Damned. The more she strays into discourses into Christianity, the more troublesome her vampire series becomes. What had appealed to me so very much in her earlier vampire books (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned), was the separation between the vampire world and the world of modern religions – be they Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. In those earlier books, she created her own pantheon, and just as I love ancient Greek and Roman mythology, I came to love her take on those creatures of the night. And while I found myself fascinated by her look at God and the Devil in Memnoch, I now want to say to Anne, “Enough already! Let’s leave ‘modern religion’ out of it and get back to the good stuff!”

The Vampire Armand focuses on possibly my least favorite “star” in Rice’s vampire world. While Antonio Banderas made Armand quite the sexy vampire in Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire film, Armand and his filthy little Paris coven never really appealed to me. While, on the one hand I found myself liking Armand more as a result of reading his story, on the other I found too many inconsistencies in his growth to believe what Rice wanted me to accept. To understand Armand’s story, a reader will have to have read the earlier books in the series for much of the story to make sense. And yet, knowing that history makes those inconsistencies all the more glaring.

The Vampire Armand focuses on the life of a brilliant, beautiful, and tortured young man. He is kidnapped from his Russian village in medieval times and ends up being “saved” by Marius, one of the oldest known vampires in the world. Marius is a keeper of young boys – he educates them, loves them, and has fallen in love with Amadeo (Armand’s original name), with whom he sleeps in his Venetian palazzo. Those of you who have not read Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy written under the name A.N. Roquelaure may be shocked by the level of homoerotic sado-masochism in Armand’s story. I’ve read that trilogy and was myself surprised at how much more sexual this book is than her other vampire novels. I was also surprised and disappointed at how very different Marius seems in this story as opposed to how he is written of in the earlier books.

Marius is rather a rogue vampire – he isn’t part of a coven and, while he doesn’t announce his vampire status to the world, he doesn’t make himself inconspicuous either. As a result, he is attacked by a coven and Amadeo kidnapped and taken to Rome, where torture apparently transforms him so much that he now believes going to churches will kill a vampire. This, of course, is in direct contradiction to those scenes earlier in the book when Marius takes Amadeo to monasteries and churches and nothing untoward happens.

This, unfortunately, destroyed the book for me. I was willing to put up with Amadeo’s sleeping with a variety of men and women during his “education,” his incessant whining to Marius about wanting to be receive the Dark Gift, even the most purple prose I’ve ever read in an Anne Rice novel. But when Amadeo becomes Armand and accepts as true those things he knows which are not, I lost all patience. And when the beautiful young man used to wearing silks and velvets settles into a life of underground filth in Paris for two hundred years until “liberated” by Lestat, the book nearly sailed across the room. For those of us who read The Vampire Lestat, this is a “gotcha!” by the author that stings.

At the end of Memnoch the Devil, Armand goes into the sun and is apparently eviscerated. In The Vampire Armand, we eventually learn what happened to him on that fateful day when the vampire world thought he had well and truly died. It is in this final portion of the book, the final quarter, that we learn what happened to him when he seemingly blew up into the heavens. Armand’s burgeoning relationship with a mortal pre-pubescent Arab boy and a nearly-deranged girl-woman pianist who save him is interesting, but is given short-shrift in the scheme of things.

Armand’s story is a woeful disappointment; perhaps Ms Rice should take another crack at her witches before attempting another vampire story. Or perhaps she should leave it alone altogether before she sullies the entire series.

(Take this link to see how I’ve rated all of Rice’s vampire novels.)