Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
-8% $9.21$9.21
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
$6.25$6.25
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Zoom Books Company
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Audible sample Sample
Merrick (Vampire/Witches Chronicles) Mass Market Paperback – October 2, 2001
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication dateOctober 2, 2001
- Dimensions4.12 x 0.98 x 6.87 inches
- ISBN-100345422406
- ISBN-13978-0345422408
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
–USA Today
“[Merrick’s] greatest strength is Rice’s skill at constructing a believably eerie New Orleans overrun by the charismatic undead and those who wish to join them. . . . Its closing pages prime the stage for the continuing adventures of the beguiling Merrick and her new fanged pals. They will all be back, of course, and Merrick leaves you looking forward to their return.”
–The Boston Globe
“RICE AT HER CHILLING BEST.”
–The Seattle Times
“RICE’S PACE HAS RARELY BEEN BETTER. . . . For those already enthralled by Ms. Rice’s witches and vampires, Merrick will strengthen the spell. And for those who haven’t been . . . well, sucked in yet, Merrick proves a worthy initiation.”
–The Dallas Morning News
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
My name is David Talbot.
Do any of you remember me as the Superior General of the Talamasca, the Order of psychic detectives whose motto was "We watch and we are always here"?
It has a charm, doesn't it, that motto?
The Talamasca has existed for over a thousand years.
I don't know how the Order began. I don't really know all the secrets of the Order. I do know however that I served it most of my mortal life.
It was in the Talamasca Motherhouse in England that the Vampire Lestat first made himself known to me. He came into my study one winter night and caught me quite unawares.
I learnt very quickly that it was one thing to read and write about the supernatural and quite another to see it with your own eyes.
But that was a long time ago.
I'm in another physical body now.
And that physical body has been transformed by Lestat's powerful vampiric blood.
I'm among the most dangerous of the vampires, and one of the most trusted. Even the wary vampire Armand revealed to me the story of his life. Perhaps you've read the biography of Armand which I released into the world.
When that story ended, Lestat had wakened from a long sleep in New Orleans to listen to some very beautiful and seductive music.
It was music that lulled him back again into unbroken silence as he retreated once more to a convent building to lie upon a dusty marble floor.
There were many vampires then in the city of New Orleans -- vagabonds, rogues, foolish young ones who had come to catch a glimpse of Lestat in his seeming helplessness. They menaced the mortal population. They annoyed the elders among us who wanted visibility and the right to hunt in peace.
All those invaders are gone now.
Some were destroyed, others merely frightened. And the elders who had come to offer some solace to the sleeping Lestat have gone their separate ways.
As this story begins, only three of us remain in New Orleans. And we three are the sleeping Lestat, and his two faithful fledglings -- Louis de Pointe du Lac, and I, David Talbot, the author of this tale.
Chapter One
"Why do you ask me to do this thing?"
She sat across the marble table from me, her back to the open doors of the cafe.
I struck her as a wonder. But my requests had distracted her. She no longer stared at me, so much as she looked into my eyes.
She was tall, and had kept her dark-brown hair loose and long all her life, save for a leather barrette such as she wore now, which held only her forelocks behind her head to flow down her back. She wore gold hoops dangling from her small earlobes, and her soft white summer clothes had a gypsy flare to them, perhaps because of the red scarf tied around the waist of her full cotton skirt.
"And to do such a thing for such a being?" she asked warmly, not angry with me, no, but so moved that she could not conceal it, even with her smooth compelling voice. "To bring up a spirit that may be filled with anger and a desire for vengeance, to do this, you ask me, -- for Louis de Pointe du Lac, one who is already beyond life himself?"
"Who else can I ask, Merrick?" I answered. "Who else can do such a thing?" I pronounced her name simply, in the American style, though years ago when we'd first met, she had spelled it Merrique and pronounced it with the slight touch of her old French.
There was a rough sound from the kitchen door, the creak of neglected hinges. A wraith of a waiter in a soiled apron appeared at our side, his feet scratching against the dusty flagstones of the floor.
"Rum," she said. "St. James. Bring a bottle of it."
He murmured something which even with my vampiric hearing I did not bother to catch. And away he shuffled, leaving us alone again in the dimly lighted room, with all its long doors thrown open to the Rue St. Anne.
It was vintage New Orleans, the little establishment. Overhead fans churned lazily, and the floor had not been cleaned in a hundred years.
The twilight was softly fading, the air filled with the fragrances of the Quarter and the sweetness of spring. What a kind miracle it was that she had chosen such a place, and that it was so strangely deserted on such a divine evening as this.
Her gaze was steady but never anything but soft.
"Louis de Pointe du Lac would see a ghost now," she said, musing, "as if his suffering isn't enough."
Not only were her words sympathetic, but also her low and confidential tone. She felt pity for him.
"Oh, yes," she said without allowing me to speak. "I pity him, and I know how badly he wants to see the face of this dead child vampire whom he loved so much." She raised her eyebrows thoughtfully. "You come with names which are all but legend. You come out of secrecy, you come out of a miracle, and you come close, and with a request."
"Do it, then, Merrick, if it doesn't harm you," I said. "I'm not here to bring harm to you. God in Heaven help me. Surely you know as much."
"And what of harm coming to your Louis?" she asked, her words spoken slowly as she pondered. "A ghost can speak dreadful things to those who call it, and this is the ghost of a monster child who died by violence. You ask a potent and terrible thing."
I nodded. All she said was true.
"Louis is a being obsessed," I said. "It's taken years for his obsession to obliterate all reason. Now he thinks of nothing else."
"And what if I do bring her up out of the dead? You think there will be a resolution to the pain of either one?"
"I don't hope for that. I don't know. But anything is preferable to the pain Louis suffers now. Of course I have no right to ask this of you, no right to come to you at all.
"Yet we're all entangled -- the Talamasca and Louis and I. And the Vampire Lestat as well. It was from the very bosom of the Talamasca that Louis de Pointe du Lac heard a story of the ghost of Claudia. It was to one of our own, a woman named Jesse Reeves -- you'll find her in the archives -- that this ghost of Claudia supposedly first appeared."
"Yes, I know the story," said Merrick. "It happened in the Rue Royale. You sent Jesse Reeves to investigate the vampires. And Jesse Reeves came back with a handful of treasures that were proof enough that a child named Claudia, an immortal child, had once lived in the flat."
"Quite right," I answered. "I was wrong to send Jesse. Jesse was too young. Jesse was never -- ." It was difficult for me to finish. "Jesse was never quite as clever as you."
"People read it among Lestat's published tales and think it's fancy," she said, musing, thinking, "all that about a diary, a rosary, wasn't it, and an old doll. And we have those things, don't we? They're in the vault in England. We didn't have a Louisiana Motherhouse in those days. You put them in the vault yourself."
"Can you do it?" I asked. "Will you do it? That's more to the point. I have no doubt that you can."
She wasn't ready to answer. But we had made a great beginning here, she and I.
Oh, how I had missed her! This was more tantalizing than I'd ever expected, to be locked once more in conversation with her. And with pleasure I doted upon the changes in her: that her French accent was completely gone now and that she sounded almost British, and that from her long years of study overseas. She'd spent some of those years in England with me.
"You know that Louis saw you," I said gently. "You know that he sent me to ask you. You know that he knew of your powers from the warning he caught from your eyes?"
She didn't respond.
"'I've seen a true witch,' he said when he came to me. 'She wasn't afraid of me. She said she'd call up the dead to defend herself if I didn't leave her alone.'"
Product details
- Publisher : Ballantine Books (October 2, 2001)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0345422406
- ISBN-13 : 978-0345422408
- Item Weight : 7 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.12 x 0.98 x 6.87 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #286,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #210 in Vampire Horror
- #1,914 in Occult Fiction
- #10,480 in Paranormal & Urban Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Anne Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, which provided the backdrop for many of her famous novels. She was the author of more than 30 books, including her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, which was published in 1976. It has since gone on to become one of the best-selling novels of all time, and was adapted into a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst, and Antonio Banderas. In addition to The Vampire Chronicles, Anne was the author of several other best-selling supernatural series including Mayfair Witches, Queen of the Damned, the Wolf Gift, and Ramses the Damned. Under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, Anne was the author of the erotic (BDSM) fantasy series, The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. Under the pen name Anne Rampling she was the author of two erotic novels, Exit to Eden and Belinda. A groundbreaking artist whose work was widely beloved in popular culture, Anne had this to say of her work: "I have always written about outsiders, about outcasts, about those whom others tend to shun or persecute. And it does seem that I write a lot about their interaction with others like them and their struggle to find some community of their own. The supernatural novel is my favorite way of talking about my reality. I see vampires and witches and ghosts as metaphors for the outsider in each of us, the predator in each of us...the lonely one who must grapple day in and day out with cosmic uncertainty."
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Merrick Mayfair is as vivid, seductive, and powerful as her distant cousins on First Street. She’s a character the reader gets close to quickly thanks to David’s thoughtful narration. I find it a wise move on Rice’s part to not have this novel narrated by Lestat, as his presence is so overwhelming (and I mean that in a positive way) in the novels he does narrate, that Merrick’s persona could have been overshadowed. But not to worry—Lestat does make a much welcome appearance towards the novel’s end. The book shifts between modern day events as well as when David first met Merrick in her teen years, which adds to the feeling that we’ve known her for quite some time.
Lovers of Interview with the Vampire will particularly enjoy this novel because of the interconnected storyline featuring the vampires Louis and Claudia. Merrick, David, and Louis create a formidable team as they try to conjure the spirit of Claudia, using all of their supernatural powers in a classically Rice-Gothic scene. That said the friendship and love among these three characters is also a reminder of the inherent goodness in the worlds that Rice creates, and her own love of the world around her.
To an extent Rice goes back to her roots in this book, culling from her knowledge of New Orleans history found in her sophomore novel, The Feast of All Saints. Merrick is a descendant of the Free People of Color in New Orleans who were often able to pass as white. This aspect of Merrick’s identity allows Rice to incorporate voodoo into witchcraft, and even takes us to the origins of ancient magic in Central America. As always Rice carefully ties all of these threads together so that the reader has no trouble following her.
A somewhat overlooked and criticized book in the Anne Rice cannon, "Merrick" is ultimately a successful novel in its blending of the supernatural, the historical, and the romantic. Rice leaves the book open for a sequel, but the reader is left with a fulfilling resolution that makes one all the more excited for the next installment.
Top reviews from other countries
話はニューオーリンズのカフェでメリック・メイフェアという魔女との会合から始まる。デビッドは彼女に頼むことがあってこの会合を計画したのだ。その頼みとはルイの望みだった。彼はかつて殺されてしまったクラウディアがあの世で安楽にしているか知りたいのた。そしてメリックに交霊してもらいたいのだった。
デビッドはこの魔女メリックと昔からの知り合いだった。彼は自分が頼めばやってくれるのではないかと考えた。
デビッドとメリックは20年以上も前から知っていた。それはタラマスカが追っていた魔女の一人で、彼女の祖母が亡くなる時に、まだ少女であったメリックを、祖母がタラマスカに託した時が最初だった。
デビッドとメリックの関係はその後も続いた。常に父のようにデビッドは接していたが、メリックはデビッドを愛するようになる。
物語はこうした二人の関係を、デビッドの回想録として綿々と綴っていく。二人で行った中米の遺跡群。そこはメリックの母コールド・サンドラと姉ハニー・イン・サンシャインがかつてメリックを連れて訪れ、財宝の一部を持ち帰ったところだった。二人はそこで新たな財宝、翡翠の仮面を手に入れることになる。それは霊を見ることのできる魔法の仮面だった。
交霊会ではこうした財宝を使って、クラウディアを呼び出し、ルイの目的を果たすことになる。だが、霊と交信したところでルイの気持ちは晴れず、最後にはとんでもないことが起こり、衝撃の結末を迎える。
最終章の最後の数行を読むと、この物語が何を語ったものかが、デビッドの口から語られるので、結果だけ知りたい方は、最終章の最後を読めば良い。
一応、メイフェアの魔女の話との連携の物語と言われるが、これはヴァパイアクロニクルの物語である。
Not so good: for me she tanks on romance and "love interest", veering into sentimentality that's just not believable - l suppose it appeals to some but not to me (imo her treatment of gay attachments tends to be more credible); in this novel the transformation of the title character in Eliza Doolittle fashion by the Talamasca is cliche verging on the risible. It may appeal to those identifying with her of a narcissistic bent. From impoverished, neglected waif to brilliant scholar of "perfect Greek" and ability to speak conversational Latin in 4 years? but not without weaknesses such as a liking for the bottle (no goody-two-shoes she!) come on, Anne: in your dreams.
The original quest of Louis for Claudia also gets lost in the jungle before re-emerging towards the end almost as an after-thought. And then.....after all that, it seems to lead to a dead end as far as Louis and Claudia go. But still, an engrossing read; her pluses far outweigh her minuses for those on the same, offbeat wavelength.
on aurait pu penser que anne rice aurait fini par s'essoufler a force d'écrire des livres sur les vampires mais ici sa chronique prend un nouvel envol puisqu'elle fait un crossover entre sa chronique des sorcieres et le monde vampirique... un pur délice!