This vampire chronicle volume is exceptional in many ways. The hero of the book, Tarquin Blackwood, is haunted from the very first day of his life, or nearly, by a ghost that becomes more and more powerful and viscious. Tarquin tells us the long tale of his initiation from childhood to adulthood and then beyond life into vampireness. We meet very genteel and fascinating people and are confronted to strange situations : the hatred from Tarquin's mother for him, the strange Hermitage in the swamps of the property, the strange characters of the past (Manfred) or the present (Pops), the fabulous Aunt Queen, 85, and her extremely loving nature, the murderous and yet very artistic and inspired nature of Patsy, Tarquin's mother, and yet again her incapability to love or have a regular life and career, the immense fortune of the family and the mythical home in which they live. But the most surprising element is that Tarquin is able to see ghosts and he is going to be haunted by several, negative like Rebecca or Goblin after a while, particularly after Tarquin's becoming a vampire, or positive like Julien Mayfair. Because Tarquin falls in love with Mona Mayfair, the Designee of the Mayfair Legacy, who is sick (see previous volumes for details) and is in fact dying. But this love brings Tarquin into some involvement with the Mayfair family and he discovers, from Julien Mayfair's ghost, that he is his own grandson or something in that line, in other words, he is a Mayfair himself. But Tarquin becomes obsessed by the Hermitage in the swamps and that brings him into a violent confrontation with Petronia, a hermaphrodite vampire from Pompeii's times. She si violent, viscious and agressive. She wants to take Tarquin over and make him her own « slave » if slavery can exist among vampires. Luckily it does not and Tarquin is able to come back to his family. But Goblin is revealed to be his dead twin brother and he has to be exhorcised, and that takes all the skill of Merrick Mayfair, a witch that had become a vampire in a previous volume. She accepts, out ofher own decision, to die along with the ghost and be able to get into the Light, that is to say into Paradise, which proves that vampires are not damned. This volume is exceptional too because of its extreme morbidity : Tarquin altogether is the witness of or is involved in a way or another with nineteen death and quite a few being of his own doing, hence murders. And yet Tarquin remains stable, easygoing, positive. He does not fall into any depression and he retains his sense of responsibilities towards his family, whose head he is. He is helped in this line by Lestat de Lioncourt, the famous New Orleans vampire, and Oliver Stirling from the Talamasca. Finally this volume is indispensible if you want to understand and follow the latest volume of these famed Vampire Chronicles, « Blood Canticle ».
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
