... and the sugar turned bitter.

"... and the floor had not been cleaned for a hundred years."

That sounds somewhat like my flat. :p

Take a deep breath, friends, and let's get into this.

Merrick is the sound of an author obliged to write a book in a series that her publisher desperately and fervently holds to be a franchise, whilst simultaneously straining against the yoke in order to grasp the freedom of doing something more, something different. Does she succeed? Well, no, not really, and here's why.

This book takes place mostly during the same time frame as the previous book, Armand the Vampire, which takes place towards the end of Memnoch the Devil, and is ostensibly about what David Talbot was doing whilst Lestat was out cold on the floor and he was not listening to Armand tell his story. This means that for two consecutive books, Lestat has been unconscious basically, and I'm fascinated by this seeming reluctance on Rice's part to return to her muse, and how she seems to have wildly vacillated from telling us of the beauty and perfection of her leading man, to continually placing stories in a setting in which he cannot interfere with or participate in.

At the beginning of the book, I found I had to remind myself who Merrick was, initially having confused her for Maharet or her sister, Mekare. I knew that I had heard of her, possibly she's mentioned in Body Thief, but I didn't know who she was, and thus, you can imagine how relieved I was to discover that it wasn't just a case of me being senile, but that she was related to another canon of the author's work, The Mayfair Witches, and I hadn't missed the introduction of an important character. I cringed at this, however, as I'm aware that this is something I do, the drafting of characters from other works that I'm not ready to let go of, especially when I'm stuck, and then I expect the poor misfortunate reader that I habitually refuse to engage with to have followed the line of breadcrumbs through everything I have ever written to understand the context of what I am presently describing. It's bad writing, and highly self-indulgent, and I feel well within my rights to criticise Rice for this, knowing that I am just as guilty. Disclaimer: I'll never change.

As you might have guessed before even opening this post, Merrick ends up as a vampire at the end of the story. Why? Because every new character ends up becoming a vampire in these books, especially those—like Merrick, like Sybelle, like Jesse Reeves—who function as stand-ins for the author, and because they are all Mary Sues, they are literally indistinguishable.

To be fair to Rice, however, there are some interests points that arise from this, as the author puppets Merrick, post-transubstantiation, across the stage, and talks with David Talbot, our narrator, of the fact that he will never understand the loneliness and fear of being a woman walking home alone at night, that he does not understand the liberation, the power of being transformed into a vampire as she does, because he has never been threatened like she has; even in his old age, he has never been vulnerable in the ways that a woman is, and he has not had to live equally guarding himself, and rashly courting danger, putting himself in harm's way out of some destructive urge. I actually really liked how Rice addressed this, however fleetingly, and I think there is room to talk about this in a more grounded fashion, as less of an aside, and I hope that maybe this leads to a more developed discussion in later books, but I highly doubt that it does.

Anyway, long story short, Merrick becomes a vampire in the end—but, oh, it is not enough to just become a vampire anymore, now everyone has to become a super vampire. As predictable as an old X-Men comic, one of the main characters also now has to die and be resurrected at the end. Last time it was Armand, this time it's Louis's turn to go into the sun. There's no drama or tension in the scene because, as before, Lestat finally wakes up, restores Louis's charred husk, and makes everyone a super vampire with his blood, which is now super potent following his dalliance with Akasha in Queen of the Damned. I find it troubling that we've gone through seven books being told of the terrible power of old vampires, and in one night Merrick gets turned into a vampire by Louis, previously the weakest, most human of the brood, and then Lestat just waltzes in and is like, "Hey everyone, who wants to be a fucking Super Saiyan? Drink up!"

A lot of this book is incredibly frustrating in how it functions as an absolute retread of aspects of the previous book, Armand, following not only the same story beats, but functionally the same plot: Lestat is asleep, people want to wake him up, they tell their stories whilst they wait, and then, at the end, he gets up. It is also frustrating that all the books end the same way, with the author explaining rather than demonstrating the gimmicks the plot introduces, in this case voodoo, and then writing them off as everyone becomes found family again, a new coven. Every book ends setting up the next, and it's always these last chapters that are the real story, making you feel as if you have just waded through a lot of inconsequential asides, only for the book to end just as the story is about to begin.

Ah, but what is that story, you might ask, and you might also accuse me of burying the lead as much as Anne Rice does in her narratives does. To that, I would take a deep breath, sigh, and tell you that you asked for this.

Told to us by David Talbot—whose narrative voice is pretty much the same as previous narrators, most notably Lestat, a limitation that becomes really apparent in a multi-character series set in first person—the story is about two things: firstly, David's relationship with Merrick Mayfair, a young girl that he and his partner, Aaron adopted following the death of her grandmother, and how, as an adult, he really wants to sleep with her, and also about Louis and Merrick's attempts to communicate with the spirit of Claudia, who they are worried is restless and has not moved on. This secondary plot annoyed me considerably, not only because it felt like a re-do of themes presented in the Body Thief, but because it seemed unfair to the character of Claudia, to her significance in the original book.

There's an anecdote that Rice denies about the original Interview with the Vampire, that both the short story and the later novel it was expanded into were a method of Rice processing the grief of her daughter's death; as I said, she denies this as being the case, but I think it's kind of accepted due to how the facts line up, and I kind of respect that, I respect that Rice told that kind of story as a way of managing grief, and I respect that she doesn't want to talk about it, and I respect that, 30 odd years later, she might still be thinking of the issue, and that she might imagine the worse, that she might picture her daughter stuck between Heaven and Hell. That strikes me as painfully poignant, the need to imagine the worst in order to hope for the best. As such the depiction of Claudia, the spitefulness, the hatefulness of her, the wrath of her presence, the violence of her words, and the uncertainty as to whether she is telling the truth is the absolute pinnacle of the book... but I have a hard time dealing with the route by which we get to this portrayal, and I have a hard time accepting that this was the kind of story needed in order to address these fears.

As a character, Merrick is really, really unlikeable. As mentioned above, like other female characters in these later books, she is a sort of idealised version of the author, but she is also idealised in that way that her negative traits are often held up and celebrated. Again, I understand this, I do this, I pick at a scab regarding my own behaviour and then I depict it on the page with a lot more blood than there needs be, displaying my faults for examination, but also, at the same time, glorifying them. Merrick's gimmick is that she goes on drinking binges, and thus, a lot of what we know about her is in relation to her ability to hold her liqueur, and her habit of just blacking out and not dealing with a situation. The other thing that defines her as a character, save for being hot for one of her adopted guardians, is that she is a witch, that she has a connexion to the spirit world. The trouble with this, however, is that it feels as if the story is trying to uncomfortably join the setting of the earlier books with these other witchy books, and thus the explanations offered don't really hold water. I like to think I'm pretty good at noticing a narrative bluff, being someone who is well versed in this bad habit, and to me it feels as if Anne Rice is intentionally blurring the lines between two concepts that she had not initially intended to be joined. The nature of the magic employed in this book also makes for a difficult read, though I appreciate this might be more my baggage than a problem with the author.

There are two issues that make me uncomfortable whenever Rice addresses them: race and sexuality. The way in which people of colour are depicted in this book is very, ah, specific to the time in which it was written, so I can't be too harsh, I suppose. The book is canonically set in the July of 1999, and was probably written around then, and, as such, it is what it is—yet, as a white person, it makes me fucking die inside when other white people write black characters in the way Rice does because we all look like insensitive shits as a result. Thus, when Rice has a character refer to someone else as an "exotically coloured creature", I can understand it is the character conveying this point, but it still doesn't make the situation easier to deal with.

Like a lot of Stephen King books, Merrick keeps coming back to one central stock character as a way of defining people of colour in its narrative, and, ah, it's pretty uncomfortable. I remember, as a teenager, first encountering the James Bond novel, Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming, and I remember feeling deeply, deeply uncomfortable about Fleming's choice of words and his depiction of voodoo; Merrick made me feel the same way, not because I can't enjoy works dealing with the principles of voodoo (Count Zero), and not because I am not attached to works that are difficult to excuse in a modern sense for the racist tropes they set in place (White Zombie), but I really, really disliked how the nature of magic was portrayed in relation to voodoo and how inescapable it is for us to address the fact that the author is white, that she is parroting back a lot of stuff secondhand from media and pop culture, and, whilst not intentionally cruel, how this is not an honest portrayal either.

What I did like about the summoning ritual was the focus of what you give, on mutilation, on blood. Despite this, it felt awkward that the spectre of one of the previous book, Memnoch the Devil, was still very much present, and it felt awkward that Rice is still trying to reconcile her canonisation of Christian myth into her stories with the very secular nature, and, as such, when she drafts in ideas again from the Book of Enoch and Jewish esotericism, it often lands flat, but, save for the portrayal of voodoo, I liked the dirtiness, the loss inherent in the idea of magical ritual.

Anyway, I mentioned there were two things that make me uncomfortable about Rice's work, and the other theme is definitely in the way that she depicts the nature of attraction. Again, context, this is a book from the '90s, and, as such, I think she was probably ahead of her time in how openly bisexual many of her characters were—certainly, there seems to be a growing focus on tender moments between male characters as the books go on. The trouble with making male characters in the stories very open about relationships with other men is that, of course, when the author arrives in the guise of whatever super important female character is being introduced this time, all of them fall for her. This is very much the case with David and Merrick, and, because of the power imbalance demonstrated by age and David being Merrick's legal guardian, it means that this book is built not only on harmful stereotypes regarding race, but also manages to unwittingly evoke the spirit of the old "gay people are sexual predators" myth of the Reagan era.

Not, of course, that this matters too much in the narrative at least, as for all of the very sexual experiences shared between David and Merrick in the book, the story goes out of its way to make him a cuckold, as he sits there watching Merrick and Louis get all hot and bothered for each other in-between summoning up the spirit of a girl who died in the 18th century.

In the end, it doesn't really matter, because like Sybelle, Merrick, obnoxious and unlikeable as she is, soon becomes a vampire, Louis dies and is resurrected, and then everyone gets together in a new family and starts drama with David and Merrick's former employers, the Talamasca, who are basically your generic secret society investigating mysteries—UNIT, WHO, the Grail, the shady guys from The X-Files, call them what you will.

I didn't like this book, suffice to say. I found it amusing when Rice complained about modern music with "hateful words" being the source of society's ailments in a scene where vampires were actually murdering people, and I found the reference to a "small modern cellular phone that is no bigger than a man's wallet" to be funny too, as you can almost imagine Rice sitting behind her large Compaq computer or whatever, with Wordstar open, just shaking her head in amazement.

"O brave new world, that has such people in 't" indeed.

The Tale of the Body Thief remains my least favourite of these books so far, but, well, Merrick comes close. Best remembered as an "also ran," and considering that Merrick's entire back-story will no doubt be retold in excruciating detail when next she turns up, I really can't think of any reason why anyone would need to read this book even if they, through some perverse desire, wanted to remain current with the ongoing story of the series.

Imagine me like a Roman emperor pointing my thumb down. That's how I feel about this book.