The Feast of All Saints (from Ballantine Books 16th Printing, 1991): In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern history.  For though they were descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who had enslaved them.  They were the gens de couleur libre - the Free People of Color - and in this dazzling historical novel, Anne Rice chronicles the lives of four of their number, men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.

Servant of the Bones (Ballantine Trade Edition, August 1997): "My name is Azriel," he said, sitting by the bed.  "They called me the Servant of the Bones," he said, "but I became a rebel ghost, a bitter and impudent genii...."

"Azriel, you must tell me everything."

Having created fantastic universes of vampires and witches, the incomparable Anne Rice now carries us into new realms of the mystical and the magical - and into the presence of a dark and luminous new hero: the powerful, witty, smiling Azriel, Servant of the Bones.  He is a ghost, demon, angel - in love with the good, in thrall to evil.  He pours out his heart to us, telling his astonishing story when he finds himself - in present day New York City - a dazed witness to the murder of a young girl and inexplicably obsessed by the desire avenge her.

Then he takes us back to his mortal youth in the magnificent city of Babylon, where he is plucked from death by evil priests and sorceresses and transformed into a genii commanded to do their bidding. Challenging these forces of destruction, Azriel embarks on his perilous journey through time - from Babylon's hanging gardens to the Europe of the Black Death to Manhattan in the 1990's. And as his quest approaches its climatic horror, he dares to use and to risk his supernatural powers in the hope of forestalling a world-threatening conspiracy, and redeeming, at last, what was denied him so long ago: his own eternal human soul.

Violin (First Ballantine Trade Edition, August 1998): While grieving the death of her husband, Triana falls prey to the demonic fiddler Stefan, a tormented ghost of a Russian aristocrat who uses his magic violin first to enchant, then to dominate and draw her into a state of madness.

But Triana understands the power of the music perhaps even more than Stefan - and she sets out to resist him and to fight, not only for her sanity, but for her life. The struggle draws them both into a terrifying supernatural realm where they find themselves surrounded by memories, by horrors, and by overwhelming truths. Battling desperately, they are at last propelled toward the novel's astonishing and unforgettable climax.

The Wolf Gift (from Amazon.com): When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it's at the behest of the home's enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably attacked--bitten--by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions. Why has he been given the wolf gift? What is its true nature--good or evil? And are there others out there like him?

The Wolves of Midwinter (from Amazon.com): The tale of THE WOLF GIFT continues...

In Anne Rice's surprising and compelling best-selling novel, the first of her strange and mythic imagining of the world of wolfen powers ("I devoured these pages... As solid and engaging as anything she has written since her early vampire chronicle fiction" --Alan Cheuse, The Boston Globe; "A delectable cocktail of old-fashioned lost-race adventure, shape-shifting and suspense" --Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post), readers were spellbound as Rice imagined a daring new world set against the wild and beckoning California coast.

Now in her new novel, as lush and romantic in detail and atmosphere as it is sleek and steely in storytelling, Anne Rice brings us once again to the rugged coastline of Northern California, to the grand mansion at Nideck Point--to further explore the unearthly education of her transformed Man Wolf.

The novel opens on a cold, gray landscape. It is the beginning of December. Oak fires are burning in the stately flickering hearths of Nideck Point. It is Yuletide. For Reuben Golding, now infused with the wolf gift and under the loving tutelage of the Morphenkinder, this Christmas promises to be like no other...as he soon becomes aware that the Morphenkinder, steeped in their own rituals, are also celebrating the Midwinter Yuletide festival deep within Nideck forest.

From out of the shadows of the exquisite mansion comes a ghosttormented, imploring, unable to speak yet able to embrace and desire with desperate affection... As Reuben finds himself caught up with the passions and yearnings of this spectral presence and the preparations for the Nideck town Christmas reach a fever pitch, astonishing secrets are revealed, secrets that tell of a strange netherworld, of spirits--centuries old--who possess their own fantastical ancient histories and taunt with their dark, magical powers...

From the Hardcover edition.

Back to On the Shelves

Ramses the Damned

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (Ballantine Books First Mass Market Edition, October 1991): Ramses the Great Lives...but having drunk the elixir of life, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied. Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes the close companion of a voluptuous heiress, Julie Stratford, who is the center of a group of jaded aristocrats with appetites of their own to appease.

But the pleasures Ramses enjoys with Julie cannot soothe him. Searing memories of his last reawakening, at the behest of Cleopatra, his beloved Queen of Egypt, burn in his immortal soul. And his intense longing for her, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger...

Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (from Amazon.com): From the iconic, bestselling author of The Vampire Chronicles, Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra.

In this mesmerizing, glamorous tale of ancient feuds and modern passions, Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old. This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life.

She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality, and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.

Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris (from Amazon.com): The gilded adventures of Ramses the Damned, iconic creation of the legendary bestselling author, continue in this breathtakingly suspenseful tale of a titanic supernatural power unleashed on the eve of war.

A pharaoh made immortal by a mysterious and powerful elixir, Ramses the Great became counselor and lover to some of Egypt's greatest and most powerful rulers before he was awakened from centuries of slumber to the mystifying and dazzling world of Edwardian England. Having vanquished foes both human and supernatural, he's found love with the beautiful heiress Julie Stratford, daughter of Lawrence Stratford, the slain archeologist who discovered his tomb. Now, with the outbreak of a world war looming, Ramses and those immortals brought forth from the mists of history by his resurrection will face their greatest test yet.

Russian assassins bearing weapons of immense power have assembled under one command: all those who loved Lawrence Stratford must die. From the glowing jewels at their necks comes an incredible supernatural force: the power to bring statues to life. As Ramses and his allies, including the immortal queens Cleopatra and Bektaten, gather together to battle these threats, Ramses reveals that the great weapon may have roots in an ancient Egyptian ritual designed to render pharaohs humble before Osiris, the god of the underworld. The resulting journey will take them across storm-tossed seas and into the forests of northern Russia, where they will confront a terrifying collision of tortured political ambitions and religious fervor held in thrall to a Godlike power. But the true answers they seek will lie beyond the border between life and death, within realms that defy the imagination of even an immortal such as Ramses the Great.

Back to On the Shelves

*NOTE ABOUT COVER ART: The covers shown do not always match the edition listed from which I used the summary.  The references are to the editions I used for the text only.  The book cover photos were chosen simply because they were either a. available or b. unique and beautiful.  The choice of different covers used throughout the site is meant to be a sort of "hidden" gallery of the cover art for Anne Rice's novels throughout their publishing history.