In addition to the Lives of the Mayfair Witches and the Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice has written some wonderful single title
novels during her career. Here is a short description of each.
Cry to Heaven (from Wikipedia): Guido Maffeo, born a peasant,
is castrated at the age of six to preserve
his soprano voice,
and becomes a star of the opera by the time he's a teenager. However, like many castrati,
he loses his voice as he enters manhood. After a failed suicide attempt,
he becomes a music teacher in
the Naples conservatorio where
he was raised. While he becomes an excellent teacher and composer,
he is denied the fame he originally had. Tonio
Treschi is (apparently) the last son of a noble family
from the Republic of Venice, his father, Andrea, a
member of the Serenissima's Council of Three. About ten years younger than Guido, he possesses
a natural soprano voice, and enjoys singing.
However, the Treschi family hides a great secret - Tonio is not the last
heir of the house, but the youngest; his older brother, Carlo, was exiled for
embarrassing the family. While Andrea Treschi attempts to cut Carlo out of the
family, after his death, Carlo returns and plots to regain his original
position. To this end, he decides on a cruel and ironic method
- because of his voice, he has Tonio castrated, and sends him off with Guido to
study in Naples.
Tonio is thus left in a hard position, divided between his love of music on one
side, and his desire for revenge on the other.
"Azriel, you must tell
me everything."
Having
created fantastic universes of vampires and witches,
the incomparable Anne Rice now
carries us into new realms of the mystical and the magical - and into
the presence of a dark
and luminous new hero: the powerful,
witty, smiling Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is a ghost, demon,
angel - in love
with the good, in thrall to evil.
He pours out his heart to us, telling his astonishing story when he
finds himself
- in present day New York City - a
dazed witness to the murder of a young girl and inexplicably obsessed by
the desire avenge
her.
Then
he takes us back to his mortal youth in the magnificent city of
Babylon, where
he is plucked from death by evil
priests and sorceresses and transformed into a genii commanded to do
their bidding. Challenging
these forces of destruction, Azriel
embarks on his perilous journey through time - from Babylon's hanging
gardens to the Europe
of the Black Death to Manhattan in
the 1990's. And as his quest approaches its climatic horror, he dares
to use and
to risk his supernatural powers in
the hope of forestalling a world-threatening conspiracy, and redeeming,
at last, what was
denied him so long ago: his own
eternal human soul.
Violin
(First Ballantine Trade Edition,
August 1998): While grieving the death of her husband, Triana falls prey
to the demonic fiddler
Stefan, a tormented ghost of a
Russian aristocrat who uses his magic violin first to enchant, then to
dominate and draw her
into a state of madness.
But
Triana understands the power of the music perhaps even
more than Stefan - and she sets out
to resist him and to fight, not only for her sanity, but for her life.
The struggle
draws them both into a terrifying
supernatural realm where they find themselves surrounded by memories, by
horrors, and by
overwhelming truths. Battling
desperately, they are at last propelled toward the novel's astonishing
and unforgettable
climax.*NOTE
ABOUT COVER ART: The covers shown do not always match the edition
listed from which I used the summary. The references
are to the editions I used for the text only. The
book cover photos were chosen simply because they were either a.
available
or b. unique and beautiful. The choice of different
covers used throughout the site is meant to be a sort of "hidden"
gallery of the cover art for Anne Rice's novels
throughout their publishing history.
More to come soon!
