The Tale of the Body Thief

Twenty Six Years with my Beloved Immortals ~ The Tale of the Body Thief

This novel, so full of intended humour and irony, was my pulling away from the attempted grandeur of Queen of the Damned, and just being together with Lestat again and letting him talk to me.

I had some idea at the outset of what would happen, but I was back in spontaneous and instinctive mode, surprising myself, and doing things which I still think are perfectly outrageous.

That this novel has become a graphic novel, gives me special happiness. You're looking at drawings of Lestat which I approved, thrilled with the whole concept of presenting the "Tale" in pictures. My debt to everyone involved with the graphic novel is immense. And I have to confess that my love of The Tale of the Body Thief is very warm still due to the story's twists and turns, which comprised a fairly daredevil road for me as I wrote it.

This was the first novel in which David Talbot truly came alive as the charming gentleman that he is, and when a character like that is born, I feel gratitude and amazement. As for Lestat, he's a perfect monster, but that's his charm. It has been all along, hasn't it?

Anne Rice

The title and story of the fourth Vampire Chronicle. The novel involves Lestat's adventure with a mortal Reglan James. They temporarily switch bodies , but then James steals Lestat's vampire body with all its powers, intending never to return it to its original owner. Lestat initially agreed to this switch because he thought he wanted to be mortal again; however, once he is actually in a mortal body, he realises he prefers being a vampire.

In mortal form, Lestat must track his immortal body down and reengage his own soul with his body. Yet the mortal body which he is temporarily inhabiting is plagued with disease, loss of power, and vulnerability to death. When Louis and Marius refuse to help him, he enlists the aid of David Talbot. Together they succeed in retrieving Lestat's other half . David, however, gets more than he bargained for when he acquires the body of a beautiful young man and is then made a vampire by Lestat.

"Body Thief was a more intimate novel than Queen", says Rice. "I got inside Lestat again to speak about the seductiveness of evil. This novel is about self-discovery. Its a truthful statement about honesty and art. Evil is not beautiful. More and more, it [BT] seems to be an answer to everything raised in Interview."

BT is a tale of jeopardy and self-revelation that also possesses the emotional sensitivity of IV. Rice threads issues of good and evil, salvation and damnation, throughout. How far, Rice asks, are each of us willing to go to achieve excitement? Throughout the novel Lestat ponders his own ability and desire to make evil attractive. He loses some of his illusions about trying to be good, and that loss hurts him. In the end, he chooses vampirism over mortality and the possibility of redemption. He knows now that he is evil and that he loves what he is.

"To me," says Rice, "Body Thief has a deep meaning that has to do with selling one's soul to the Devil, and to what extent everyone does that. There's a bottom line of ruthlessness in almost every person where you decide what to do to make life exciting enough. That's what the whole book is about."

The idea for BT came to her the week she finished QD, but she put it on a back burner, to allow it to grow while she went to another novel that had been on hold for several years. The Witching Hour.

In the first draft of BT, Rice wrote fifty pages that she later cut because she wanted a more fast-paced opening. In these pages, Lestat recaps QD and describes what happened to various members of the surviving coven. He visits David Talbot in Venice and takes him to the Hagia Sophia. After he leaves David, Lestat finds himself in Hong Kong, taken there by Khayman on Marius's orders. Marius is still the stern teacher and demands that Lestat cease the antics that are making him conspicuous to the mortal world. As Lestat defies Marius and goes off into Hong Kong to hunt, it becomes clear that the old intimacy between them is gone. He then encounters a brown-haired man in Venice and in Hong Kong that later turns out to be Raglan James.

Rice thought BT could be the last book in The Vampire Chronicles; it certainly felt that way to her when she was finished. "I'll write another one if something comes to me" she admitted, "but this feel like a concluding book." A few months later, she knew she could write yet a fifth one, and did, calling it Memnoch the Devil.


	Miami, 1992, "city of water, city of speed," tropical garden of a city where corruption pulses beneath the lush surface. Miami, the perfect city for a vampire. Yet Lestat - hero, rock star, incorrigible seducer of millions, the most powerful and sensual vampire of them all - prowls this savage garden in desperate misery. Restlessly pursuing the mystery of his dark existence across time and space, from New Orleans to Venice, the Cotswolds to the Amazon rain forest, nineteenth-century London to the Paris and snowbound crags of his eighteenth-century youth, Lestat yearns to think and breathe and feel as a man, to walk in the sun, free of his nightmare immortality. Stalked in his turn by the only creature who can grant his desire, Lestat - against all the rules, all urgent warnings - rashly seizes it. While the Body Thief, cloaked in his immortal powers, lays a trail of carnage across America and the Caribbean, Lestat is abandoned to the long-forgotten clumsiness, the unassuageable hungers, the fragility of human life, to discover that a mortal body is no fit receptacle for a vampire's soul...	The Tale of the Body Thief ~ Chatto & Windus 1992 (UK)
	Rejected by the other vampires - by Marius, by Claudia, even by his beloved Louis - a tormented and appallingly vulnerable Lestat is forced to seek human help to recover his vampire self. Help he abuses unforgiveably when, in a mesmerizing climax, he succumbs to the basest urge in any nature... Electrifying, erotic, terrifying - the forth book in the Vampire Chronicles is as rich, as violent, as sensual, as the three runaway best-sellers that preceded it. Anne Rice casts a spell like no other writer: The Tale of the Body Thief unlocks the door to entrancement. The Tale of the Body Thief ~ Chatto & Windus 1992 (UK)
	The Tale of the Body Thief ~ Knopf 1992 (US)	In a new feat of hypnotic storytelling, Anne Rice continues the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles that began with the now classic Interview with the Vampire and continued with The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. Lestat speaks. Vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals. For centuries he has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Lestat is alone. And suddenly all his vampire rationale - everything he has come to believe and feel safe with - is called into question. In his overwhelming need to destroy his doubts and his loneliness, Lestat embarks on the most dangerous enterprise he has undertaken in all the danger-haunted years of his long existence. The Tale of The Body Thief is told with the unique - the mesmerising - passion, power, colour, and invention that distinguish the novels of Anne Rice. The Tale of the Body Thief ~ Knopf 1992 (US)
	Twenty Six Years with my Beloved Immortals ~ The Tale of the Body Thief This novel, so full of intended humour and irony, was my pulling away from the attempted grandeur of Queen of the Damned, and just being together with Lestat again and letting him talk to me. I had some idea at the outset of what would happen, but I was back in spontaneous and instinctive mode, surprising myself, and doing things which I still think are perfectly outrageous. That this novel has become a graphic novel, gives me special happiness. You're looking at drawings of Lestat which I approved, thrilled with the whole concept of presenting the "Tale" in pictures. My debt to everyone involved with the graphic novel is immense. And I have to confess that my love of The Tale of the Body Thief is very warm still due to the story's twists and turns, which comprised a fairly daredevil road for me as I wrote it. This was the first novel in which David Talbot truly came alive as the charming gentleman that he is, and when a character like that is born, I feel gratitude and amazement. As for Lestat, he's a perfect monster, but that's his charm. It has been all along, hasn't it? Anne Rice The title and story of the fourth Vampire Chronicle. The novel involves Lestat's adventure with a mortal Reglan James. They temporarily switch bodies , but then James steals Lestat's vampire body with all its powers, intending never to return it to its original owner. Lestat initially agreed to this switch because he thought he wanted to be mortal again; however, once he is actually in a mortal body, he realises he prefers being a vampire. In mortal form, Lestat must track his immortal body down and reengage his own soul with his body. Yet the mortal body which he is temporarily inhabiting is plagued with disease, loss of power, and vulnerability to death. When Louis and Marius refuse to help him, he enlists the aid of David Talbot. Together they succeed in retrieving Lestat's other half . David, however, gets more than he bargained for when he acquires the body of a beautiful young man and is then made a vampire by Lestat. "Body Thief was a more intimate novel than Queen", says Rice. "I got inside Lestat again to speak about the seductiveness of evil. This novel is about self-discovery. Its a truthful statement about honesty and art. Evil is not beautiful. More and more, it [BT] seems to be an answer to everything raised in Interview." BT is a tale of jeopardy and self-revelation that also possesses the emotional sensitivity of IV. Rice threads issues of good and evil, salvation and damnation, throughout. How far, Rice asks, are each of us willing to go to achieve excitement? Throughout the novel Lestat ponders his own ability and desire to make evil attractive. He loses some of his illusions about trying to be good, and that loss hurts him. In the end, he chooses vampirism over mortality and the possibility of redemption. He knows now that he is evil and that he loves what he is. "To me," says Rice, "Body Thief has a deep meaning that has to do with selling one's soul to the Devil, and to what extent everyone does that. There's a bottom line of ruthlessness in almost every person where you decide what to do to make life exciting enough. That's what the whole book is about." The idea for BT came to her the week she finished QD, but she put it on a back burner, to allow it to grow while she went to another novel that had been on hold for several years. The Witching Hour. In the first draft of BT, Rice wrote fifty pages that she later cut because she wanted a more fast-paced opening. In these pages, Lestat recaps QD and describes what happened to various members of the surviving coven. He visits David Talbot in Venice and takes him to the Hagia Sophia. After he leaves David, Lestat finds himself in Hong Kong, taken there by Khayman on Marius's orders. Marius is still the stern teacher and demands that Lestat cease the antics that are making him conspicuous to the mortal world. As Lestat defies Marius and goes off into Hong Kong to hunt, it becomes clear that the old intimacy between them is gone. He then encounters a brown-haired man in Venice and in Hong Kong that later turns out to be Raglan James. Rice thought BT could be the last book in The Vampire Chronicles; it certainly felt that way to her when she was finished. "I'll write another one if something comes to me" she admitted, "but this feel like a concluding book." A few months later, she knew she could write yet a fifth one, and did, calling it Memnoch the Devil. The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland
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