A review by barebookbear
Vittorio, the Vampire by Anne Rice

3.0

I was prepared not to like this one. I was pleasantly surprised. She doesn't go way off the rails into dreamy crazy-town territory when it comes to her often-used overly lush and sentimentally poetic descriptions, like in her Armand book. She keeps the story-telling fairly straightforward. I liked how this book stands completely on its own with almost no mention of the Chronicle vampires.

While it may not be completely successful, I can appreciate her attempts to paint an historical location for us, this time of early fifteenth century (Northern?) Italy, using geography, religious beliefs and historical artists. Vitoria becomes a character in a particular place and time and reacts as such to that.

I also kept thinking as I read it that this would make a great movie. The storyline stands alone, with rather specific and picaresque scenes of beauty and horror. The whole blood communion sequence would make a great Act 2 in a film, and the storyline of the perfect isolated town slowly revealing the reason for its perfection would play out very well on film.

The mixture of angels and demons didn't bother me; that's been an ongoing theme in Rice's work through her whole career and makes sense for her personally as she travels her own spiritual journeys, her own questions that probably started with the death of her young daughter.

It's not perfect, but worth the short time it takes to move through it.