Blackwood Farm (Vampire Chronicles Series #9)

Blackwood Farm\ 1\ Lestat,\ If you find this letter in your house in the Rue Royale, and I do sincerely think you will find it—you’ll know at once that I’ve broken your rules.\ I know that New Orleans is off limits to Blood Hunters, and that any found there will be destroyed by you. And unlike many a rogue invader whom you have already dispatched, I understand your reasons. You don’t want us to be seen by members of the Talamasca. You don’t want a war with the venerable Order of Psychic Detectives, both for their sake and ours.\ But please, I beg you, before you come in search of me, read what I have to say.\ My name is Quinn. I’m twenty-two years old, and have been a Blood Hunter, as my Maker called it, for slightly less than a year. I’m an orphan now, as I see it, and it is to you that I turn for help.\ But before I make my case, please understand that I know the Talamasca, that I knew them before the Dark Blood was ever given to me, and I know of their inherent goodness and their legendary neutrality as regards things supernatural, and I will have taken great pains to elude them in placing this letter in your flat.\ That you keep a telepathic watch over New Orleans is plain to me. That you’ll find the letter I have no doubt.\ If you do come to bring a swift justice to me for my disobedience, assure me please that you will do your utmost to destroy a spirit which has been my companion since I was a child. This creature, a duplicate of me who has grown with me since before I can remember, now poses a danger to humans as well as to myself.\ Let me explain.\ As a little boy I named this spirit Goblin, and that was well before anyone had told me nursery rhymes or fairy tales in which such a word might appear. Whether the name came from the spirit himself I don’t know. However, at the mere mention of the name, I could always call him to me. Many a time he came of his own accord and wouldn’t be banished. At others, he was the only friend I had. Over the years, he has been my constant familiar, maturing as I matured and becoming ever more skilled at making known to me his wishes. You could say I strengthened and shaped Goblin, unwittingly creating the monster that he is now.\ The truth is, I can’t imagine existence without Goblin. But I have to imagine it. I have to put an end to Goblin before he metamorphoses into something utterly beyond my control.\ Why do I call him a monster—this creature who was once my only playmate? The answer is simple. In the months since my being made a Blood Hunter—and understand, I had no choice whatsoever in the matter—Goblin has acquired his own taste for blood. After every feeding, I am embraced by him, and blood is drawn from me into him by a thousand infinitesimal wounds, strengthening the image of him, and lending to his presence a soft fragrance which Goblin never had before. With each passing month, Goblin becomes stronger, and his assaults on me more prolonged.\ I can no longer fight him off.\ It won’t surprise you, I don’t think, that these assaults are vaguely pleasurable, not as pleasurable to me as feeding on a human victim, but they involve a vague orgasmic shimmer that I can’t deny.\ But it is not my vulnerability to Goblin that worries me now. It is the question of what Goblin may become.\ Now, I have read your Vampire Chronicles through and through. They were bequeathed to me by my Maker, an ancient Blood Hunter who gave me, according to his own version of things, an enormous amount of strength as well.\ In your stories you talk of the origins of the vampires, quoting an ancient Egyptian Elder Blood Drinker who told the tale to the wise one, Marius, who centuries ago passed it on to you.\ Whether you and Marius made up some of what was written in your books I don’t know. You and your comrades, the Coven of the Articulate, as you are now called, may well have a penchant for telling lies.\ But I don’t think so. I’m living proof that Blood Drinkers exist—whether they are called Blood Drinkers, vampires, Children of the Night or Children of the Millennia—and the manner in which I was made conforms to what you describe.\ Indeed, though my Maker called us Blood Hunters rather than vampires, he used words which have appeared in your tales. The Cloud Gift he gave to me so that I can travel effortlessly by air; and also the Mind Gift to seek out telepathically the sins of my victims; as well as the Fire Gift to ignite the fire in the iron stove here that keeps me warm.\ So I believe your stories. I believe in you.\ I believe you when you say that Akasha, the first of the vampires, was created when an evil spirit invaded every fiber of her being, a spirit which had, before attacking her, acquired a taste for human blood.\ I believe you when you say that this spirit, named Amel by the two witches who could see him and hear him—Maharet and Mekare—exists now in all of us, his mysterious body, if we may call it that, having grown like a rampant vine to blossom in every Blood Hunter who is made by another, right on up to the present time.\ I know as well from your stories that when the witches Mekare and Maharet were made Blood Hunters, they lost the ability to see and talk to spirits. And indeed my Maker told me that I would lose mine.\ But I assure you, I have not lost my powers as a seer of spirits. I am still their magnet. And it is perhaps this ability in me, this receptiveness, and my early refusal to spurn Goblin, that have given him the strength to be plaguing me for vampiric blood now.\ Lestat, if this creature grows ever more strong, and it seems there is nothing I can do to stop him, is it possible that he can enter a human being, as Amel did in ancient times? Is it possible that yet another species of the vampiric root may be created, and from that root yet another vine?\ I cannot imagine your being indifferent to this question, or to the possibility that Goblin will become a killer of humans, though he is far from that strength right now.\ I think you will understand when I say that I’m frightened for those whom I love and cherish—my mortal family—as well as for any stranger whom Goblin might eventually attack.\ It’s hard to write these words. For all my life I have loved Goblin and scorned anyone who denigrated him as an “imaginary playmate” or a “foolish obsession.” But he and I, for so long mysterious bedfellows, are now enemies, and I dread his attacks because I feel his increasing strength.\ Goblin withdraws from me utterly when I am not hunting, only to reappear when the fresh blood is in my veins. We have no spiritual intercourse now, Goblin and I. He seems afire with jealousy that I’ve become a Blood Hunter. It’s as though his childish mind has been wiped clean of all it once learned.\ It is an agony for me, all of this.\ But let me repeat: it is not on my account that I write to you. It is in fear of what Goblin may become.\ Of course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broken yours.\ I want you who were kidnapped and made a vampire against your will to look kindly on me because the same thing happened to me.\ I want you to forgive my trespass into your old flat in the Rue Royale, where I hope to hide this letter. I want you to know as well that I haven’t hunted in New Orleans and never will.\ And speaking of hunting, I too have been taught to hunt the Evil Doer, and though my record isn’t perfect, I’m learning with each feast. I’ve also mastered the Little Drink, as you so elegantly call it, and I’m a visitor to noisy mortal parties who is never noticed as he feeds from one after another in quick and deft moves.\ But in the main, my existence is lonely and bitter. If it weren’t for my mortal family, it would be unendurable. As for my Maker, I shun him and his cohorts, and with reason.\ That’s a story I’d like to tell you. In fact, there are many stories I want to tell you. I pray that my stories might keep you from destroying me. You know, we could play a game. We meet and I start talking, and slap damn, you kill me when I take a verbal turn you don’t like.\ But seriously, Goblin is my concern.\ Let me add before I close that during this last year of being a fledgling Blood Hunter, of reading your Chronicles and trying to learn from them, I have often been tempted to go to the Talamasca Motherhouse at Oak Haven, outside of New Orleans. I have often been tempted to ask the Talamasca for counsel and help.\ When I was a boy—and I’m hardly more than that now—there was a member of the Talamasca who was able to see Goblin as clearly as I could—a gentle, nonjudgmental Englishman named Stirling Oliver, who advised me about my powers and how they could become too strong for me to control. I grew to love Stirling within a very short time.\ I also fell deeply in love with a young girl who was in the company of Stirling when I met him, a red-haired beauty with considerable paranormal power who could also see Goblin—one to whom the Talamasca had opened its generous heart.\ That young girl is beyond my reach now. Her name is May-fair, a name that is not unfamiliar to you, though this young girl probably knows nothing of your friend and companion Merrick Mayfair, even to this day.\ But she is most certainly from the same family of powerful psychics—they seem to delight in calling themselves witches—and I have sworn never to see her again. With her considerable powers she would realize at once that something catastrophic has happened to me. And I cannot let my evil touch her in any way.\ When I read your Chronicles, I was mildly astonished to discover that the Talamasca had turned against the Blood Hunters. My Maker had told me this, but I didn’t believe it until I read it in your books.\ It’s still hard for me to imagine that these gentle people have broken one thousand years of neutrality in a warning against all of our kind. They seemed so proud of their benevolent history, so psychologically dependent upon a secular and kindly definition of themselves.\ Obviously, I can’t go to the Talamasca now. They might become my sworn enemies if I do that. They are my sworn enemies! And on account of my past contact, they know exactly where I live. But more significantly, I can’t seek their help because you don’t want it.\ You and the other members of the Coven of the Articulate do not want one of us to fall into the hands of an order of scholars who are only too eager to study us at close range.\ As for my red-haired Mayfair love, let me repeat that I wouldn’t dream of approaching her, though I’ve sometimes wondered if her extraordinary powers couldn’t help me to somehow put an end to Goblin for all time. But this could not be done without my frightening her and confusing her, and I won’t interrupt her human destiny as mine was interrupted for me. I feel even more cut off from her than I did in the past.\ And so, except for my mortal connections, I’m alone.\ I don’t expect your pity on account of this. But maybe your understanding will prevent you from immediately annihilating me and Goblin without so much as a warning.\ That you can find both of us I have no doubt. If even half the Chronicles are true, it’s plain that your Mind Gift is without measure. Nevertheless, let me tell you where I am.\ My true home is the wooden Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island, deep in Sugar Devil Swamp, in northeastern Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi border. Sugar Devil Swamp is fed by the West Ruby River, which branches off from the Ruby at Rubyville.\ Acres of this deep cypress swamp have belonged to my family for generations, and no mortal ever accidentally finds his way in here to Sugar Devil Island, I’m certain of it, though my great-great-great-grandfather Manfred Blackwood did build the house in which I sit, writing to you now.\ Our ancestral home is Blackwood Manor, an august if not overblown house in the grandest Greek Revival style, replete with enormous and dizzying Corinthian columns, an immense structure on high ground.

\ From Barnes & NobleThis ravishing Vampire Chronicles novel tells the carefully knotted tales of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant and charming young bloodsucker who has been haunted since childhood by a mysterious doppelgänger named Goblin. Quinn enlists the feared, revered Lestat to help control this ominous creature. Together they return to Quinn's Southern gothic hereditary estate, where they unearth dark family secrets that only make his nemesis more menacing.\ \ \ \ \ Ottawa Citizen[Merrick] is a book where Rice's two worlds — of witches and vampires — finally collide.\ \ \ Globe and MailRice's strengths as a writer [include] her knack for colourful characters, her loving attention to historical detail [and] her imaginative exploration of myth and mysticism.\ \ \ \ \ From The CriticsAfter the historical wanderings of 2001's Blood and Gold , Rice takes a step into the modern day with this newest installment of the Vampire Chronicles series. Quinn Blackwood is the scion of a wealthy and eccentric Louisiana family. They have a seemingly limitless fortune, their own haunted mansion and even a haunted island in Sugar Devil Swamp. A passionate, bisexual young man, Quinn has been turned into a vampire, and the entire book is his retelling of that violent and tragic event to Lestat, the brat prince of the undead. Making an appearance in the story are Chronicles standbys the Talamasca, an ancient order of scholars who just refuse to allow the undead to drink blood in peace. Quinn's moony musings and the Creole flavorings of the story inevitably recall Louis, Lestat's aristocratic companion from Interview With the Vampire . Quinn can give a rich poetic spin to the most mundane events, but, like Louis, he can also come off as a pretentious dilettante. Rice wisely intertwines Quinn's tale with that of the Mayfair witches, her other favorite night-stalkers, who breathe fresh air into the sexy, if occasionally silly, story. Author—Chris Barsanti\ \ \ \ \ Chris BarsantiAfter the historical wanderings of 2001's Blood and Gold, Rice takes a step into the modern day with this newest installment of the Vampire Chronicles series. Quinn Blackwood is the scion of a wealthy and eccentric Louisiana family. They have a seemingly limitless fortune, their own haunted mansion and even a haunted island in Sugar Devil Swamp. A passionate, bisexual young man, Quinn has been turned into a vampire, and the entire book is his retelling of that violent and tragic event to Lestat, the brat prince of the undead. Making an appearance in the story are Chronicles standbys the Talamasca, an ancient order of scholars who just refuse to allow the undead to drink blood in peace. Quinn's moony musings and the Creole flavorings of the story inevitably recall Louis, Lestat's aristocratic companion from Interview With the Vampire. Quinn can give a rich poetic spin to the most mundane events, but, like Louis, he can also come off as a pretentious dilettante. Rice wisely intertwines Quinn's tale with that of the Mayfair witches, her other favorite night-stalkers, who breathe fresh air into the sexy, if occasionally silly, story.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyJust in time for Halloween, Rice's latest gothic epic blends her beloved Vampire Chronicles with her Mayfair Witches series. Near the dank Sugar Devil Swamp, sinister bayou country where critters far more fearsome than gators lurk, overheated Quinn Blackwood suffers a protracted case of adolescent angst driven by his violent love-hate relationship with Goblin, his spirit-world doppelganger. As heir to Blackwood Farm and an enormous fortune, Quinn enjoys every luxury the decadent Deep South of Rice's imagination can provide, from culinary delicacies to Jasmine, his equally satisfying mulatto housekeeper. Seemingly hell-bent on seducing everyone within range, regardless of gender, age or consanguinity, he falls into a passionate but fatal relationship with 15-year-old nymphomaniac Mona Mayfair, offshoot of the Mayfair clan of witches. But he cannot control Goblin's ferocious jealousy or his nefarious double's taste for blood, particularly once Quinn is made into a Blood Hunter by Petronia, a malignant bisexual spirit who stalks the haunted family cemetery at the edge of the swamp. Rice fleshes out her slim plot line with gory set pieces of vampire history in ancient Athens, Pompeii and 19th-century Naples. She excels at vivid descriptions of macabre landscapes, gloomy estate houses and the lust that motivates her Blood Hunters and propels her ghoulish narratives. Her dialogue and characterizations, however-even of the durable Vampire Lestat, called upon by Quinn for deliverance from Goblin and Sugar Devil Swamp's unholy spirits-are flat and predictable here. But it's intrigue, eroticism and obsession that fans want, and they'll find plenty of all three. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalFledgling vampire Quinn Blackwood makes a desperate appeal to the older, stronger Lestat to save his loved ones from Goblin, a doppelganger out to destroy them. Since Quinn entered the dark world of the undead, the once caring and protective Goblin has amassed tremendous strength and a ruthlessness that cannot be controlled. Lestat is intrigued but refuses to make a decision until Quinn tells his life story. Slowly, the dark, Gothic settings and eccentric characters that make Rice's fiction so fascinating emerge. Quinn, along with his mirror image, Goblin, resides on Blackwood Farm, an immense Louisiana estate. His was an isolated childhood but not an unhappy one. Then, while in his teens, he learns of an ancestor's horrifying crime, one that continues to attract vengeful ghosts. The brightest light in Quinn's life is Mona Mayfair, a delicate, pretty girl who blithely admits to being a witch. With the introduction of Mona, Rice deftly brings together her two popular series, the "Vampire Chronicles" and the "Mayfair Witches." The result is at least as good as Rice's earliest novels because she centers her story on new characters with interesting stories of their own. Using lush, voluptuous prose, Rice tells a complex and mesmerizing story. Recommended. -Patricia Altner, Information Seekers, Columbia, MD Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.\ \