Blackwood Farm

Lestat is back, saviour and demon, presiding over a gothic story of family greed and hatred through generations, a terrifying drama of blood lust and betrayal, possession and matricide.

Blackwood Farm with its grand Southern mansion, set among dark cypress swamps in Louisiana, harbours terrible blood-stained secrets and family ghosts. Heir to them all is Quinn Blackwood, young, rash and beautiful, himself a tyro 'bloodhunter' whom Lestat takes under his wing. But Quinn is in thrall not only to the past and his own appetites but, even more dangerously, to a companion spirit, a 'goblin' succubus who could destroy him and others. Only the unearthly power of Lestat combined with the earthly powers of the ubiquitous Mayfair clan could hope to save Quinn from himself and his ghosts, or to rescue the doomed girl Quinn loves from her own mortality...

Blackwood Farm
~ Chatto & Windus 2002 (UK)

Shocking, savage and richly erotic, this novel with the deceptively gentle title brings us Anne Rice at her most powerfully disturbing. Here are vampires and witches, men and women, demons and doppelganger, caught up in a maelstrom of death and destruction, blood and fire, cruelty and fate.

Blackwood Farm ~ Chatto & Windus 2002 (UK)

Blackwood Farm
~ Knopf 2002 (US)

In her new novel, Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive strains of narrative - her vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches - to give us a world of classic Deep South luxury and ancestral secrets.

Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelganger, a spirit known as Goblin, a spirit from a dreamworld that Quinn can't escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelganger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself.

As the novel moves backwards and forward in time, from Quinn's boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present-day New Orleans, from ancient Pompeii to nineteenth-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the specter that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds.

Like her much-loved novel The Witching Hour, Blackwood Farm is a family saga - capturing both the dramas and the subtleties of family as it tells its story of youth and promise, of loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny. It is Anne Rice at her best.

Blackwood Farm ~ Knopf 2002 (US)