PANDORA
New Tales of the Vampires
Anne Rice

There is a great temptation to believe that somewhere early in her writing career Anne Rice really ticked off some ghoul, and the author is being terribly punished for it. Having been allowed to stand oh so briefly on the mountaintop with the literary gods, Rice has now been assigned to the lowest depths of hackdom, forced to churn out grotesquely-formed caricatures of her own early beautiful creations. Or, at least, one is tempted to believe that.

Anne Rice has written seven books about the lives of the undead: six in the original "Vampire Chronicles" series that ended with "Memnoch The Devil" and now "Pandora," the first in her "New Tales of the Vampires." The first two novels--"Interview With A Vampire" and "The Vampire Lestat"--were absolutely brilliant, the first real improvement in the genre since the publication of "Dracula" in 1897. While Bram Stoker showed us Dracula from afar, Rice took us into the very soul of the vampires themselves, revealing what it was like for a vampire to see her last sunrise as a mortal, or to feel a victim pass over from life into death in his mouth, or to experience the terrible, drawn-out loneliness of centuries of existence.

But after "Lestat" the series took a rapid descent in quality, with the undying Lestat campily flitting around the world, the otherworld, and the underworld in what might more properly have been a comic book called "The Adventures of Biteman." Lestat makes love with the goddess of all vampires, Lestat becomes a rock star, Lestat trades bodies with a mortal man and sees how the other half lives, Lestat battles the Devil and goes to heaven to chat with God, Lestat goes back to first century Golgotha and does the ultimate vampire high: drinking Christ’s blood (and I do not mean at communion). uise in the movies. Lestat even has time to shed light on one of Christianity’s greatest mysteries: the secret of the Turin Shroud. One expected that for his next feat, our vampire hero would travel back to the Time Before The Big Bang and straighten out our misguided theories on quantum physics. But even Anne Rice has come to feel that perhaps she has drained enough blood from this corpse and so, in "Pandora," she lets Lestat lay in a stupor on the floor of a New Orleans chapel while she fills us in on what all the other children of the night have been up to in the meantime.

"Pandora" is the story of a Roman woman born in the year 15 B.C. during the reign of Augustus Caesar and forced to flee to the ancient Turkish city of Antioch during a period of political upheaval. She is given the "Dark Gift" (made undead) by the Roman vampire Marius, who has appeared before in the Vampire Chronicles as Lestat’s sometime-nemesis.

There is precious little suspense in "Pandora," or action, or dramatic tension leading up to action. Enemy vampires get defeated by making the most stupid of mistakes, like biting the goddess vampiress on her neck without her permission, or allowing themselves to be herded together into a circle so they can be hacked and burned to death en masse. And missing is Rice’s sharp-eyed recounting of the little, everyday differences between life in modern times and life in antiquity, the type of details that made "The Vampire Lestat" such a good read. Instead, much of "Pandora" is merely an intricate and highly boring recounting of of obscure bits of Roman political and cultural history, as if Rice is trying to convince somebody somewhere that she did her research. In between, vampires engage endless philosophical debates:

"Resignation will do you no good when such a time comes," Pandora says in one installment of what she calls her "two hundred year brawl" with Marius, "Resignation requires belief, and belief requires that there is something to believe in! And all action or acceptance requires a concept of a witness! Well, there is nothing, and there are no witnesses! ... Go back to your history, this stack of lies that tries to link event to event with cause and effect, this preposterous faith that postulates that one thing follows another. I tell you, it’s not so. But it is very Roman of you to think so." She concludes by remarking that she and Marius "had many similar arguments as the decades passed." Vampires can debate on and on about the most arcane ideas because, of course, they expect to live forever, but even Marius grows weary at the end of a couple of centuries and slips away one day while Pandora is resting in her crypt. Really. Mortal readers may want to move on a bit more quickly.

At the end, Rice reveals that "Pandora" has actually only been a holding pattern for Lestat, until he recovers from the attack lethargy incurred while battling the Devil in "Memnoch." "I have strong reason to believe that Marius has gone to New Orleans," Pandora says at the end of her tale, "and I must be reunited with him. I must seek out Lestat [who is also in New Orleans]." So New Orleans it is, in the next installment. At the bottom of the last page, Rice writes "The Vampire Chronicles will continue." Oh, no! At long last, we come to a part of this book that is a true horror.