SOURCE: “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” in Washington Post Book World, November 6, 1988, pp. 8-9.

In the following excerpt, Bleiler evaluates The Queen of the Damned in relation to previous volumes of “The Vampire Chronicles.”

I did things backwards when I approached Anne Rice's The Queen of the Damned, the third volume in her “Vampire Chronicles.” I read it first, then the second volume (The Vampire Lestat) and, last of all, Interview with the Vampire, the first book in the series. In one way this turned out to be an advantage, since I could see the latest book as an independent work, as a new reader might see it and not as a book sustained by others. As a disadvantage, I first thought, there might be a problem coming in cold on situations, events, and personalities all based on the past.

It turned out, when I read the...