Traveling Vampire Anne Rice Takes Her Immortal Lestat To Heaven And Hell And A Few Strange Places In Between

“Memnoch the Devil” Anne Rice (Knopf, $25)

In Anne Rice’s “Memnoch the Devil,” the story opens with the vampire Lestat, a perfect imitation of a blond, blue-eyed, 6-foot Anglo-Saxon male, hot on the trail of his latest victim.

For those of you who have been living on another planet, you read it right, Lestat is a vampire - one of the strongest anyone could hope to encounter. He’s an immortal, virtually ageless since 1789. In the prologue, Lestat tells readers: “I am rich. I am beautiful. I can see my reflection in mirrors.”

It is the vampire’s immortality - and the following line - that beckons readers on. He tells us: “We don’t - either of us - know what it means to die, no matter what we might say to the contrary. It’s a cinch that if we did, I wouldn’t be writing and you wouldn’t be reading this book.”

While Lestat is in New York City, stalking his latest victim, a drug dealer (perhaps justifying Lestat’s lust for blood?), he falls in love with the victim’s daughter, Dora, a beautiful, young evangelist. Never mind her. Lestat doesn’t have the time nor the opportunity. He is whisked away on a tour of heaven and hell, with the devil as his guide.

Lestat sees God, hears a revisionist account of the Creation and is offered the job of serving as the devil’s chief assistant.

When the story isn’t set in heaven or hell, the action takes place in New York City and New Orleans. Some of the scenes are absolutely spellbinding. For example, in the early pages of the book, when Lestat’s victim is dead, his body parts scattered hither and yon, he appears at Lestat’s side, neither battered nor broken.

“What’s the matter?” he asks. “No one in all these centuries has ever come back to haunt you?”

For avid readers of “The Vampire Chronicles,” this fifth volume in the series is a “must buy.” The story is also comprehensible to those unfamiliar with Rice’s previous novels in the series. But, ultimately, old and new readers alike may get lost in the author’s visions of God and the devil, heaven and hell.

Some readers, like Lestat himself, may find themselves trying to claw their way out of the novel - oops, make that hell:

“Escape! I ran and ran, sliding down the loose marl and the slippery bank, and stomping through the shallow streams and through the clumps of the astonished Helpful Dead, and over wailing souls.

“‘Where is the stairs? Where are the gates? You can’t deny it to me. You have no right. Death has not taken me.’ I shouted but I never looked back and I never stopped running.”

Lestat makes a successful return to Earth, immortality, Dora, his vampire friends, and, in all likelihood, future Rice novels.

For my taste, forget the theology and give me a good, old-fashioned, blood-sucking, fang-bearing vampire story any day.