Anne Rice: A Critical Companion

A year after his adventures as a human being in The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat the vampire is in New York stalking a new victim, Roger, a drug dealer and vicious murderer who is also a great collector of religious art and the father of one of the few truly good humans Lestat has ever encountered, Dora Flynn. Lestat plans to kill Roger but not until Roger has said good-bye to Dora, who is returning to New Orleans where she has her own religious cable TV show. Roger deserves to die, but Lestat has no wish to cause Dora any suffering at all because he has come to love her for her goodness and her belief.

In the back of his mind he has another problem: something’s stalking him. He’s had the feeling for months, something dark behind him, watching him, waiting for him, something like the Devil. Shrugging off the thought, Lestat kills Roger and then dismembers him, scattering his body parts throughout New York. But when he goes into a bar to rest, Roger sits down beside him, the first of his victims ever to return as a ghost. Roger holds Lestat spellbound as he tells him the story of his life and entrusts his daughter into Lestat’s hands. His only regret is that he never found Dora the Veil of Veronica, the woman who wiped Christ’s face on the way to the cross and thereby imprinted His picture on the cloth. While Lestat is still dealing with this, Roger fades away into death, and Lestat encounters the next being who wants to tell him a story, his supernatural stalker, Memnoch the Devil, come out of Hell to recruit

-99-