by Marlo Bennett

Is it for love or money? Love or greed? Love or Lestat?

In trying to consider The Vampire Armand a worthy successor to Anne Rice's earlier Vampire Chronicles, those all seem the same question.

While Chronicles 4 and 5 (The Tale of the Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil) are often considered to be books that don't belong in the series -- neither advanced the theories or legends of the earlier works, but were simply supernatural adventure stories filled with familiar characters -- The Vampire Armand postures itself as a deeper look at the characters and trials of the earlier works in the series. Titled similarly to Chronicle 2 (The Vampire Lestat) and told to a writer mostly in retrospect (as was the series' beginning, Interview with the Vampire), Armand offers background on Louis' and Lestat's long-time immortal acquaintance/enemy/friend, the vampire Armand. It details his mortal and immortal childhoods and his vampiric transformation, as well as giving us his perspective on events we've already heard in other books.

It's an attractive premise for a book, as Armand has seemed an interesting character since his introduction as leader of a vampire theater troupe in the first book. ("Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires. How avant garde," said one character upon her first visit to the theater.) But it reads like an amateur attempt at post-modern writing, and like an attempt to avoid thinking by rehashing old texts.

While Louis in Interview managed to intersperse his commentary and life story seamlessly, Armand, who's telling his story to Body Thief main character David Talbot, jumps in with the grace of ... well, of a fledgling vampire making his first kill. It's two steps away from being a story in which the narrator announces "Wait, I don't like where this is going. Just forget the last page."

Armand's childhood reads like Rice's 1982 Cry to Heaven -- but with vampires instead of castrati -- painstaking details of everyday life, of clumsy sex and of coming-of-age type adventures. And most of Armand's tales after becoming a vampire have been detailed for us in earlier works and don't benefit from our getting Armand's perspective -- he even tells us at one point we'll have to forgive him if he slips into using Lestat's already-published words at times, it's just that Lestat did such a good job of telling the story!

The real point of Armand seems to be taking our minds off the series' most popular vampire, Lestat; after all, not every work can be about him! The book's main action is inaction -- it begins with Lestat essentially lying in state as many of the world's immortals gather, hoping he'll come out of his convalescence and tell them about his meeting with Christ at the end of Memnoch. (That's why Armand is even bothering to tell David his story -- they're both there, waiting.)

As such, Armand's story makes him out to be the anti-Lestat. He talks about his centuries-long love affair with Louis, who is another complete opposite of Lestat despite having been made by him; Armand benefited from a loving maker, while everyone knows Lestat's maker was crazy and went into the flames seconds after making him; Armand wasted centuries fooled by another's creed/theology -- Lestat has never even bothered to listen to anyone else; and Lestat would never, no matter how true it was, tell us that he's using someone else's words to tell a story and therefore we might get bored with it. And Rice then turns Marius, one of the world's oldest vampires and Armand's maker, into a sort of substitute-Lestat -- he has blonde hair where it's always been described as white before, and we actually find him rashly making new vampires, which most immortals (but not Lestat) consider abhorrent.

Marius does have some beautiful lines at the end, all about loving and seeing truth in the world, but it's hard to accept that you've fought through over 300 pages to get to the one chapter of new thought.

Twenty-two years after the first Vampire Chronicle, it's hard to tell if Rice still loves her creations or if she just loves how many books they sell. The Vampire Armand gives us a lot, but we heard most of it long ago.

Maybe she's trying to snare a new collection of fans without requiring them to have prior knowledge of the series; or maybe this is the beginning of an attempt to return to the Chronicles' roots and she wanted to remind us of what we may have forgotten. Maybe she did it so that Marius could decide that the dark centuries of bloody religion hadn't ended, despite his earlier pronouncement, or so that Armand could think he'd truly found love in the most unexpected place.

But I think she did it for Lestat. He'll be back.