How to Read The Vampire Chronicles in Order

The series begins with the confessions of a centuries-old vampire, told to a young reporter in New Orleans circa the 1970s. This is the ravishing story of Louis de Pointe du Lac, an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner seduced into vampirism at the fangs of radiant but mercurial Lestat de Lioncourt. Sometimes friends and lovers, other times bitter enemies, Louis and Lestat salvage their strained immortal bond by turning orphaned young Claudia into their undead companion. But condemning the fast-maturing Claudia to eternal life in a child’s body results in a shocking betrayal—one whose consequences spin out across continents and decades. In this first volume of The Vampire Chronicles, Rice crafts a sensual fictive dream of sex and seduction, good and evil, death and immortality. She evokes all of it in voluptuous prose practically dripping with the bayou humidity of New Orleans, making for a true fantasia of the senses.

The beating heart of The Vampire Chronicles is Lestat de Lioncourt, Rice’s beloved antihero. He takes center stage in The Vampire Lestat, which opens with an audacious frame device: After decades of slumber, Lestat awakens in the 1980s to the seductive sound of heavy metal. Determined to achieve international superstardom and reveal the secretive vampire race to the human world, Lestat commandeers a rock band (which he modestly renames the Vampire Lestat) and pens his autobiography. From here, the novel rolls back the clock to his youth as the son of a nobleman in prerevolutionary France, his transformation into a vampire at the hands of Magnus, his quest to understand the ancient origins of vampires, and even a rehash of Interview with the Vampire, told through his eyes. If Interview with the Vampire didn’t make you fall in love with Lestat, then you’ll be powerless to resist his charms in this volume. You’ll also leave with a new understanding of just how he came by the nickname “The Brat Prince.”

What’s a bored vampire to do but become a glam metal superstar? The frame device of The Vampire Lestat continues in The Queen of the Damned, but this third volume of the series marks a major leap forward: Here, Rice’s detailed vampire mythos comes into view. When the 6,000-year-old mother of all vampires, Akasha, is awakened by Lestat’s dulcet tones, she mobilizes her plan to “save” mankind, unleash global carnage, and destroy Lestat. The novel reaches deep into ancient Egypt, with Rice unspooling a spellbinding origin story for Akasha and all of vampire-kind. She also introduces the Talamasca, a secret society of “psychic detectives” who watch over the world’s paranormal creatures, as well as their leader, David Talbot. For some readers, the journey can end here, as it’s widely acknowledged that the first three volumes are the series’ best. But for those who are motivated to continue, the lore only gets deeper and richer from here.

If your interest in The Vampire Chronicles extends only so far as the Anne Rice Cinematic Universe, then it’s time for you to exit through the gift shop. But if you’ve been thoroughly bewitched by now, press on with this crime caper wrapped in a vampiric existential crisis. Plagued by despair and loneliness, a tormented Lestat makes a deal with a body-swapper in a bid to regain his humanity, just for one day—but little does Lestat know, this con man has no intention of swapping back. So begins Lestat’s globe-trotting scheme to restore himself to his body, but along the way, he stumbles into some downright comedic misadventures. After centuries of superpowered life, Lestat’s re-entry to human frailty is hilariously bumpy: He nearly dies of pneumonia, he falls madly in love with the nun nursing him, and he struggles to use indoor plumbing. (Cut the guy some slack—he hasn’t defecated since the 1700s.) In a series packed with darker fare, the light touch of The Tale of the Body Thief is a welcome respite.

It was only a matter of time before word of Lestat’s exploits traveled. In the fifth volume of the series, the Devil himself comes knocking to offer Lestat a job. Whisking our favorite bloodsucker away on a whirlwind tour of heaven and hell, he narrates a theological history that falls into lockstep with the vampiric lore laid out in The Queen of the Damned. Lestat returns from his cosmological journey with the Veil of Veronica, ignites a global religious movement, and promptly falls into a long vampiric coma. Some say that Rice jumped the shark with this, her most controversial installment of The Vampire Chronicles. Notably, Memnoch the Devil sees Lestat sink his fangs into Christ on the cross; it also includes a lurid scene wherein Lestat consumes a woman’s menstrual blood. We’ll let you decide which scene is more unforgettable.

Armand, a debonair vampire frequently seen in Louis and Lestat’s orbit, finally takes flight in book six. Here, Armand unspools his peripatetic backstory, from a boyhood in Kiev Rus to captivity in Constantinople to a new life in Renaissance-era Venice, where he’s sold into the famed painter Marius’s harem of boys. After Marius gives Armand the Dark Gift, the novel moves through centuries of sumptuous dramatic history, from fin de siècle Paris to present-day New Orleans. Armand makes for an emotive and romantic storyteller in this memorable tale of sex, art, and salvation.

You’ve got to hand it to Anne Rice: She was serving up crossover events long before they were cool. The Vampire Chronicles converges with The Lives of the Mayfair Witches in Merrick, which sees Louis head home to New Orleans to confront the series’ original sin: the vampiric transformation of Claudia. Haunted by Claudia’s spirit years after her destruction, Louis turns to the powerful witch Merrick Mayfair to commune with Claudia’s vengeful ghost, but the séance has near-fatal results. Narrated by fan favorite David Talbot, Merrick brings dark beauty to its heady blend of magic, witchcraft, and life after death.

In Anne Rice-landia, everyone gets a backstory—and every storyteller gets an amanuensis. Volume eight finds Armand’s maker Marius telling tales to Thorne, an ancient Nordic vampire newly awakened after spending centuries frozen in a block of ice. Marius details what it was like to live through the rise and fall of many empires, from Rome to Byzantium to Italy’s Renaissance years of “blood and gold.” Through it all, he collides with major players like Akasha and Lestat, adding ever more richness to the series’ lore. For readers who admire Rice’s miraculous gift for sculpting history with texture and liveliness, Blood and Gold is a true treasure.

The crossover that began with Merrick continues in Blackwood Farm, as Rice blends the ghostly delights of the Mayfair Witches saga with the familiar Vampire Chronicles formula. Here she takes us to a macabre new setting: Blackwood Manor, located deep in the haunted Sugar Devil Swamp, where novice vampire Quinn Blackwood enjoys erotic encounters with the ghosts in his family home and suffers the attacks of a doppelgänger spirit. Only one man can help Quinn shake his spectral problem. You guessed it: Lestat (with an assist from Merrick Mayfair). Rich in historical flair, Blackwood Farm includes vivid flashbacks to gory vampiric encounters in ancient Athens, Pompeii, and 19th-century Naples. After a few volumes of globe-trotting, this installment marks Rice’s welcome return to the swampy, steamy, witchy bayou she knows best.

In Blood Canticle, Lestat narrates for the first time since the much-maligned Memnoch the Devil, opening the book with an indignant metafictional salvo: “What the hell happened when I gave you Memnoch the Devil?” he exclaims, peevish as ever. “You complained!” Like Memnoch before it, Blood Canticle suffered a rocky landing. After hundreds of Amazon reviewers panned the book, Rice fired back: “Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander,” she wrote. “You have used the site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehoods and lies.” We’ll let you be the judge of the novel’s success. It’s classic Vampire Chronicles melodrama, with Lestat once again seeking redemption—but this time, he bestows the Dark Gift on a dying woman, falls in love with a Mayfair witch, and aspires to become a holy saint. Just another day in the vampiric life, right?

Eleven years after she vowed to end the series with Blood Canticle, Rice just couldn’t quit her fanged favorites, so she came roaring back with Prince Lestat. The author’s son and literary executor, the novelist Christopher Rice, has called this volume “a true sequel to The Queen of the Damned.” Many of the characters introduced in The Queen of the Damned return here, including David Talbot and Akasha’s ancient Egyptian enemies, Maharet and Mekare. Obsessed with his iPod and playing Bon Jovi on repeat (yes, seriously), Lestat is disturbed from his rock star reverie by desperate pleas to save the vampiric community from civil war. Prince Lestat proves that despite Rice’s intention to hang up her quill, the series still had some venom left—it’s a satisfying battle royale for a sprawling cast of familiar favorites.

Described by Rice as one of her “greatest personal adventures,” the penultimate volume of the series sends Lestat into even stranger territory than heaven or hell: This time, he descends into the lost realm of Atlantis, courtesy of the ancient spirit taking up residence in his body. And just when you thought the lore couldn’t get any more outrageous, Rice adds aliens to the mix. Yes, you heard that right. The lost city of Atlantis, it turns out, was inhabited by extraterrestrial creatures called “replimoids”—and their secrets may unlock enduring mysteries about the origin of vampires. Dismayed by Rice’s effort to retcon aliens into her vampiric lore, many readers dismissed this volume as a “trainwreck.” If you’re a purist about Rice’s lore, feel free to skip it—but if you can reframe it as a kooky diversion, there’s plenty of excitement and gore to be had here.

The series ends with the ultimate showdown for vampire-kind, featuring the welcome return of beloved characters like Louis, Armand, and Marius. In this final volume, we find Lestat a changed man: No longer the arrogant Brat Prince or the rebellious rock star, he now presides over his community of vampires (the Blood Communion) with an ethos of love, hope, and pacifism. But when ancient foes mount a formidable threat, Lestat and his followers must defend their way of life to preserve the future of the vampire race. This volume is shorter and talkier than Rice’s standard fare—and as such, lacking in the lavish flights of description for which the author is so beloved—but still, it’s rich in passion and violence, love and hate, damnation and salvation. Leave it to Rice to bring the series home with a blood-soaked conclusion that bites back.