SOURCE: “A History of the Undead,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 6, 1988, p. 13.

In the following review, Coven offers favorable assessment of The Queen of the Damned.

In Interview With the Vampire, the first volume of the “Vampire Chronicles,” Anne Rice ushers us into the eerily succulent, yet refined world of Louis de Pointe du Lac, a man who became a vampire in late-18th-Century New Orleans.

The second book, The Vampire Lestat, explodes with fury into the world of high-tech 20th-Century San Francisco. Lestat, the charismatic iconoclast of the undead, relates his tale from his human youth as a French nobleman of the early 1700s to his ascension to rock superstardom and cult hero worship as a modern-day vampire.

With The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice has created universes within universes, traveling back in time as far as ancient, pre-pyramidic Egypt and journeying from the...