The queen of the damned

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The novel The Queen of the Damned (Original title: The Queen of the Damned ) by the American writer Anne Rice was published in 1988 and is the third book of the Chronicle of the Vampires .

The plot of the novel follows on from that of The Prince of Darkness and places the origin of the vampires at the center of the story.

Content of the vampire novel

preface

In Marius' hiding place, a place in a huge, snow-covered wasteland, the queen of the vampires, Akasha, suddenly awakens from her rigidity to the music of Lestat's rock band and kills Enkil. Marius is thrown into a crevasse by her, from which he cannot free himself.

Part I: On the way to the vampire Lestat

In the six sections of the first chapter, both humans and vampires, both known and unknown up to then, are presented during a period of time. An old man has a dream about the twins and wants to share this with his former client (Maharet). The vampire girl Baby Jenks also has this dream and later goes up in flames by an unknown force. Pandora hears Marius' cries for help and seeks out the vampire Azim, who is worshiped as a god, and asks him about the twins. Daniel Molloy, the boy from Conversation with a Vampire lives with Armand, who makes him a vampire. After a long sleep, Khayman, one of the oldest vampires, wakes up in Athens and sets off to look for Lestat. Jessica Miriam Reeves, Jesse for short, meets her relatives Maharet and Mael and joins the Talamasca, who send them to New Orleans to research Lestat, where she finds Claudia's diary in the old apartment of him, Claudia and Louis . Then she also goes to Lestat.

Part II: Twilight of the Ghosts

Lestat's concert takes place on Halloween 1985 in San Francisco , to which Armand and Daniel appear, as well as Jesse, Khayman, Mael and some members of the Talamasca. Akasha kills a few vampires who are hostile to the Lestat and thus reduces them to a small group from which she hopes for loyalty to her project.

Part III: As in the beginning, now and forever ...

Lestat, who was abducted by Akasha after the concert, receives from her pictures of past and present events. He therefore sees, among other things, how Pandora and Santino finally free Marius from the crack in the ice. Then she takes him to his family's castle in Auvergne and teaches him to fly.

Meanwhile, the remaining vampires Pandora, Marius, Santino, Mael, Jesse, Armand, Daniel, Gabrielle, Louis, Khayman and Eric meet in Maharet's house in Sonoma .

Akasha and Lestat go to Azim and she kills him; together with Lestat the people are murdered in the temple and Akasha gives the survivors the message that she, the Queen of Heaven, will bring peace. She then leads Lestat to a civil war zone, where Akasha orders women to kill their husbands.

Meanwhile, Maharet tells the vampires present her story: She and her sister Mekare were witches who communicated with spirits and lived in the caves of Mount Carmel . In Egypt, King Enkil marries the beautiful Akasha, who came from Uruk . This then forbids cannibalism in the Nile Valley. After the death of their mother, Mekare and Maharet begin to eat her corpse until Egyptian soldiers capture the sisters and bring them to Egypt to the couple of pharaohs, who ask them about the origin of their powers and miracles. Since their answers do not satisfy either, the sisters are raped in front of the court of Khayman, during which Maharet conceives a child, and both are then abandoned in the desert. However, they will be returned later.

Lestat wakes up in a house on an island in the Mediterranean and learns from Akasha that she wants to kill all men in order to save the world from further wars, suffering and destruction. He tries to convince her of the opposite with arguments, but cannot change her decision.

After an interruption, Maharet continues her story: the spirit Amel, who had followed the sisters to Egypt, stayed there to punish Khayman for his crime against the sisters and rages in his house. Enkil and Akasha try to talk to the spirit because they fear a revolt of the people who blame both for the disaster. In the house they are attacked by traitors and seriously injured. Amel penetrates the queen's wounds and revives her almost dead body, making her the first vampire. To save her husband, she lets him drink her blood and in this way creates a second vampire.

Lestat can meanwhile persuade Akasha to go to the other vampires, as he hopes that they could influence Akasha and dissuade her from her plan.

Maharet continues: However, since the king and queen do not want to accept their new form and the associated properties, they seek help from the sisters. Out of anger that the witches cannot help them, both are mistreated and Maharet's eyes are removed and Mekare's tongue is cut out. Meanwhile Akasha creates a new vampire out of her court master Khayman, who in turn turns Mekare into a vampire and who also transforms her sister. Akasha has the two sisters separated and placed in stone coffins that are supposed to drift east and west on the ocean. Maharet, stranded on the east coast of southern Africa , has been trying to find her sister since then - initially in vain, until an archaeologist in Peru discovered drawings by the sisters that must have come from Mekare. Maharet also tells about the big family, the descendants of their daughter Miriam.

Part IV: The Queen of the Damned

Lestat and Akasha arrive at Maharet's house with the other vampires. The attempt to convince Akasha to give up her plan fails. However, Mekare appears, who attacks Akasha and can bring her down. Together with Maharet, Mekare eats the brain and heart of Akasha, whereby the spirit Amel is now in her body and Mekare becomes the queen of the vampires.

Part V:… a world without end, amen

The vampires have come together in Armand's mansion in Miami and spend some time together before everyone goes their own way again. Lestat, meanwhile, is writing his short story "The Queen of the Damned" and is still in mourning over the death of Akasha. Together with Louis, he goes to New Orleans, where they visit their old house, in which they had lived with Claudia, and then fly to London , to the headquarters of the Talamasca, where they visit David Talbot, the head of the secret organization.

Narrative situation and time level

The first and second parts of the novel as well as the insertions in the third consist for the first time of a personal narrative situation. The presentation of the plot is not operated by Lestat in the form of an authorial or first-person narrator. This becomes clear from the fact that, among other things, the description of Lestat on the stage is written in the third person and thus Lestat is by no means the narrator. This makes it possible to put what happened (the legend of the twins, the concert) in context with later experiences with Akasha. This change of perspective removes the action from the subjective level and takes on an all-encompassing character.

In this narrative situation, however, Maharet in particular emerges as the narrator of longer passages, which causes flashbacks ( analepsis ) within the time level that explain the conflict.

The insertions in the third part and the entire fourth and fifth section are written from the perspective of the first-person narrator, whose role is played by the vampire Lestat. This narrative situation creates a feeling of identity between the recipient and the narrator and lets him participate directly in the action. However, the narrator describes what happened from a temporal distance, which makes him more mature and more experienced than his “experiencing self” and gives the action a subjective character.

Historical references

In contrast to the two previous novels, no references to modern times are made here, but to antiquity. Akasha, for example, comes from the city of Uruk , one of the oldest Sumerian cities in Mesopotamia. The settlement of Mount Carmel , the place where the Sisters lived in today's Israel , has also been archaeologically documented since the Paleolithic .

Cinematic implementation

The novel The Queen of the Damned was filmed together with The Prince of Darkness in 2001 with Aaliyah (Akasha) and Stuart Townsend (Lestat) under the title Queen of the Damned .

Text output