Review

I liked this one notably less than the other two. Queen of the Damned felt so plot-heavy to me. One of my favorite aspects of both Interview and Vampire Lestat is how we really sink into these characters. The extended brooding, philosophizing, the decades stretching on and on. In Queen, I wasn't a fan of the frequent perspective shifts. I didn't dislike any of the characters, but I felt we never really got a chance to sit with any of them. The whole book felt cinematic to me. Not in an especially good way. I did, in fact, enjoy the worldbuilding that was happening. The lore of these vampires is interesting. But I found myself really missing our single focused narration.

It also feels so strange to me that this is the third book in a series of, what? Ten or more books if we include the connected series? This felt relatively conclusive. I mean there were lingering threads that can certainly be picked up on. But I do feel we're sort of pigeon-holed in having made our way up to $CURRENT_YEAR (as of each book's writing). Given that the we've covered so much history in the first three books, I have this anticipatory trepidation that there's suddenly gonna be a lot of events happening from the 80s up to early 2000s for some strange reason. I dunno. I truly didn't dislike. I just have problems here that I definitely did not with either of the previous books in the series.

I would say the other thing I disliked was how passive Lestat was. That's partially to do with the comparatively small slice of the action he's getting. But it's just a bit of a bummer that his role in Queen is...basically follow Akasha around? What does he really do here save for occasionally stammer "Pretty please no kill all the men..." I really loved the Lestat we saw in the previous book. Was missing him. Kept expecting Stella to get her groove back and for him to proper stand up to her and be our lovely hero who saves us all. But that really just doesn't happen. I did kind of enjoy how much of the conclusive action was our immortals sitting around a table debating. Genuinely. It seemed like the sort of way things would naturally go when you start dealing with immortal characters. Of course, we do then just behead the bitch. So...

I might do more of the series, not sure. May do a bit of research to see if this or any of the other books are a good offboarding point. Not really feeling excited for more in the series as I had been after reading each of the last two, unfortunately. But thus far it's still probably one of the best iterations of vampire story I've read.