El Santuario
Anne Rice
Publicado: 2002 | 557 páginas
Novela Terror
Serie: CrĂłnicas VampĂ­ricas #9 /s8q16ss4u_G4

Quinn Blackwood, un rico y excéntrico joven convertido en vampiro, pide la ayuda de Lestat para librarse del celoso control a que le somete Goblin, su doppelgänger. Desde que Quinn entró en el reino de los muertos, Goblin, otrora su sombra fiel, se ha convertido en una amenaza para los seres cercanos al atractivo gentleman. Lestat, intrigado, le pide a Quinn que narre la historia de su vida. Este recuerda su infancia en el seno de una familia muy peculiar y describe sus días en Blackwood Farm, la mansión de altas columnas y extensos jardines rodeada de zonas pantanosas en la que creció y ahora reside. Apesar de su amor por Mona Mayfair, una bella bruja con la que mantiene una apasionada relación, Quinn posee una agitada vida amorosa que, junto a su imperioso deseo de beber sangre, le ha llevado a recorrer el mundo y conocer distintas épocas de la historia. Del Nueva Orleans actual al Nápoles del siglo XIX, pasando por la antigua Atenas o Pompeya, la intensa trayectoria vital de Quinn reúne en un mismo volumen las Crónicas Vampíricas y la serie de Las Brujas de Mayfair para revelar nuevos episodios de la historia de los vampiros.

I have owned this book (and most of the series) for a LONG time and am finally getting around to finishing them. I put down Blood & Gold about 120 pages in due to boredom, so I took a chance and jumped into this one. For being such a very long novel, I got through it relatively quickly, although there were definitely some slow spots that I could hardly wait to get past. This story was wind-y and twisty and not really what I was expecting for a "Lestat book." I've always found Anne Rice books difficult to read, but this one was a little less so than the rest. I won't go into details or character development since there are so many characters and so much going on in Quinn's story. Suffice it to say, if you enjoyed the first seven(?) books in the series, then you will more than likely enjoy this one...I would suggest skipping number eight though. But that's just me.

All in all, an epic novel of family, love, lore, ghosts, and, in the end, vampires. ( )

excellent book.

Great intertwining of the Vampires and Mayfair Witches. Loved catching up with Mona, Michael and Rowan. Can't wait to read the next installment. ( )

Of all the Vampire Chronicles, this is probably my favorite - after The Vampire Lestat, of course. The story of Tarquin Blackwood in his journey from mortal to vampire is tragically beautiful. The main reason I read this book was that I had heard that Lestat was in it and I was on a binge-read of all things TVL. Much to my surprise, the (former) Brat Prince doesn't really play a large role in this novel but it's no biggie because Tarquin- in the telling of his life story - stole a piece of my heart; his life feels so familiar and while the wry sarcasm that Lestat is known for is missing, Quinn is just as charismatic.

I hope he makes an appearance in the upcoming show for The Vampire Chronicles.

(Off topic but I always thought that Robert Sheehan would make a great Quinn Blackwood!) ( )

I’ve had a copy of BLACKWOOD FARM on my shelf for a few years, waiting while I made my way through the rest of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, with a detour through the three books of The Mayfair Witches. I am a big fan of the former, which contains some of the most impressive world building to be found in horror fantasy, and not so much the latter, which I found indulgent even by Rice’s standards, with a side helping of erotica that wasn’t always to my liking. Nevertheless, with all that reading behind me, I wanted to see what BLACKWOOD FARM would bring forth, as it is a novel with a foot planted in both of Rice’s fictional worlds, which have now come to overlap and merge. In my opinion, we get the best of both in a book that will surely please any hard core Rice fan. There’s no end of the oddness, kinks and quirks, and the downright grotesque that longtime readers have come to expect.

Primarily this book is a vampire story, that vampire being the fledgling Quinn Blackwood, a young man turned into a blood drinker early in life. Young vampire Quinn has a problem named Goblin, a spirit who has haunted him since infancy, a doppelganger and companion whom only Quinn and those like him who are perceptive to spirits, can see, but now that Quinn is a creature of the night, the possessive Goblin has become truly monstrous and impossible to control. Since Quinn is the heir to a palatial farm in Louisiana, it is only natural that this inexperienced vampire journey to New Orleans and seek out Lestat, the brat prince of Undead, Rice’s most famous fictional creation. Of course this sets up one of the author’s most tried and true storytelling tropes, where Quinn sets down and tells Lestat his life’s story up to that moment, which encompasses about 500 pages, as learn the history of the Blackwood family, and of the land they’ve lived on for generations. We meet lots of characters along the way, including a few who cross over from the Mayfair books, and learn a few secrets. In the book’s finale, we learn who Goblin really is, and why he is attached to Quinn.

Like most of Anne Rice’s later books, readers seem to have run hot and cold on BLACKWOOD FARM in equal numbers, but I liked it better than just anything she’s written since THE QUEEN OF THE DAMNED. At this point, you either go with Rice’s style, or you don’t, and if you go with it, then it means overlooking a few flaws, especially her love of detail and description – the reader will know every inch of the Blackwood’s home and the swamp adjacent to it in their minds by the end. Then there is the thing with the cameos. I liked the main character of Quinn, who can come across as an indulged and spoiled little rich boy, one capable of simply going off on a three year tour of the finest and most culturally refined parts of Europe for one section of the story, but I found his earnestness a refreshing change from some of Rice’s other story narrators. My favorite moment in the book is when Quinn, newly made a Blood Hunter by Petronia (definitely not one of my favorite Rice characters), promptly announces that he is not going to be staying among the immortals in Italy, but returning to his human family in Louisiana, and resuming as normal a life as possible among them. I thought Quinn and Mona Mayfair were a wonderful couple (overlooking the fact that she’s only 15 years old), and I found myself rooting for them. Like many of Rice’s novels, this one could have been helped by some editing, though it never plodded along like some of the Mayfair books; there were enough dramatic twists and turns to satisfy me. Rice’s tendency to telegraph how you are to feel about her characters is very evident, everyone loves Aunt Queen, the Blackwood matriarch, while Patsy, Quinn’s errant mother, is to be held in low regard because she hates her son and makes no secret of it. Some plot threads feel underdeveloped, such as Rebecca, the ghost of the mistress of a long gone Blackwood, to whom Quinn loses his virginity. Others, like Quinn’s teenage Uncle Tommy, feel like a story line being planted for a future book. There are some things that just made me shake my head, such as Quinn having elderly Black female servants sleep with him (in a non sexual way) for comfort until he’s nearly an adult. And this book really drove home the fact that Anne Rice, despite her progressive politics, can be a real snob, especially in the way she handles Patsy, whose crime seems to be that she didn’t want to be a properly cultured little rich girl, but instead wanted to have career making low class country and pop music, and Tommy’s mother, Terry Sue, who sin is that she is poor, overweight, lives in a trailer, and can’t stop having children.

Like many other reviewers, I felt that Lestat had simply been shoe horned into the narrative to please the fans; his contribution to the story is fairly minimal. There are appearances by Rowan Mayfair and Michael Curry, the main characters from the Witches trilogy, and it is still apparent that Curry is Rice’s ideal man in the way she lovingly gives a physical description. Oncle Julian Mayfair shows up at one point, reminding me why he is one of my Top Five Anne Rice characters. For those not that familiar with Rice, it is not necessary to have read all of her previous books before opening BLACKWOOD FARM, but I would recommend reading INERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE LESTAT before cracking this one. Anyway, I’m looking forward to BLOOD CANTICLE; the next volume in Anne Rice’s enduring series, and seeing what she has in store for these characters. ( )