Customer Reviews

Memnoch the Devil

5 star:		(167)
4 star:		(65)
3 star:		(35)
2 star:		(54)
1 star:		(64)

 

 

I have read nearly all of Anne Rice's vampire/witch chronicles and fell in love with the stories. A friend and I trade the books and can't wait to discuss each new twist, however, Memnoch will not be one which we will ever read again. This book was dreadfully wordy and the story was awful. There was nothing about this book which will lead me to read it again. After I finally reached the mid-point of the story I began skimming the paragraphs just to get through. I have never done this with any other Anne Rice book. I cringe whenever anyone asks me what I thought of this book and quickly refer them to The Witching Hour, Blackwood Farm, Blood and Gold, Interview with the Vampire, etc. as those books are where Anne writes a wonderfully absorbing tales. Don't bother with Memnoch. Future stories do refer back to ideas and scences in this book but it is just not worth spending the time to struggle through this book for the minor mentions in other books.

I promise you won't be disappointed, especially if you are an Anne Rice fan! Beware that you must read 'The Vampire Chronicles' in order as to understand the characters and their history.

I find Anne Rice's book way too descriptive at moments.
Usually, I find it takes too long for the story to become interesting. However, when I start liking the story, it lasts until the last page.

However, with this book, it was the opposite.
It started very good and then it became bad... very bad...
I stopped reading it.
I was in the middle of the book and nothing was going on... no action... just Lestat talking about God to Memnoch...
It was way too religion-oriented for my taste... big disappointment.

I found this to be Anne Rice's best book. On one hand it is not a typical "horror" story, but then, what greater horror is there than to be considered by the devil an equal? So rare is it to read a book with new ideas on the concept of God, the Devil and man's relationships with them. I was absolutly engrossed by Memnoch's story and Lestat's coming to terms with this new perception good and evil. This is a great book, even for those who have not read any of the other book in the series.

After the 4th book-THE STORY OF THE BODY THIEF-that was mesmerizing, convincing and lots of fun, I was looking forward to this one, and... was deeply disappointed.
Anne Rice is a great writer: the language is rich, the imagination is vivid and convincing - Not this time:
The depiction of God and angels (the whole "parade" of them) is so banale, trivial, and boring. The Hebrew she uses is flawed.
Lestat is not the main character here; his presence is weak and not interesting, and so is Memnoch's.
Dora also looked under developed and very stereotypical. The blood scene with her and Lestat at the end seemed to me as if Ms. Rice needed to add something shocking after the boring pages earlier.
Actually, I couldn't find a story here that draws me in; I had to force myself.
Trying to combine Christian beliefs (Catholics?) with Science, Creationism, and some sort of fictional imagination, created a lot of repetetive mish-mash, and no original philisophy - no original anything!
I still like her as a writer, and hope that this book was just a slip on her part.

This book was absolutely phenomenal! I own the entire Vampire Chronicles and this is Anne Rice at her very best! This is by far my favorite book in the series so far. (I haven't read them all yet). Lestat is being stalked by something he refers to as "The Ordinary Man" who actually turns out to be the devil himself in another form. Lestat is stalking a drug lord and at the same time, the devil is stalking him. the devil introduces himself as Memnoch and takes Lestat on his most extrordinary adventure yet- to Heaven and then to Hell. Lestat is forced to choose who he will serve, the devil or God or neither one. lestat meets the daughter of the drug lord, Roger, whose name is Dora. Dora and Lestat try to help each other and give each other advice. then Lestat seeks out Memnoch and his newest and most daring adventure begins. A great book! I would reccommend this book to any person like myself who is absolutely infatuated with Lestat or Anne rice's novels as she tells her newest installment. I read it in less than a month when I was 16! (I'm a very slow reader by the way) and I absolutely could not put it down! You don't have to read the rest of the chronicles first. They all seem to be written in no particular order anyway. Get this book as soon as you can! It's sensational!

While i consider Anne Rice to be an exceptional writer, sometimes i find it hard to work through a few of her books. For example, i thought that The Vampire Lestat and The Tale of the Body Thief were really good stories, but i was wondering while reading when the next big development might happen to make the story progress. From what i read she tends to go alot into detail (not like that's a bad thing) and it sometimes loses me because i want to get into the story fast. That definetly wasn't the case with the detailed story called Memnoch the Devil.

The whole idea behind the story is Lestat meets the devil (of course, right?) and the devil gives him the choice of working with him or with God to end the religious battle that has been going on for centuries. To aid Lestat in his choice, the devil tries to pursuade Lestat into joining his side by telling him the story of creation and how he fell from glory up to the present day. Anne Rice does a wonderful job in writing this tale. I read over 2/3rds of this 400+ page book in one day, i absolutely could not put it down.

The way she describes things, her spin and her idea about the beginning of time and how the devil fell from grace is, while at times disagreeable, incredably interresting. While Memnoch is telling Lestat the tale he pulls both Lestat and the reader into the story. The book is well written and the way she portrays the creation is incredable. I recommend that anyone interrested in religion or faiths or in the series itself should read this book because it brings fourth not only and interresting story that will make you never want to drop the book when you hit page 182 but because of the controversy of her theory on creation.

In the end; read it, you will not regret it and, possibly even like me, this book may just become your favorite book in the whole series.

Love the philosophical aspect of this novel. Totally recommend this book!

Tale of the Body Thief, Anne Rice's fourth book that came out before this one, was one of my personal favorites by Anne and I never thought that one day I would rate one of her novels below at least a four- oh but this one that I pounced on immediately after I read Tale of the Body Theif the fifth time, threw me off that light little cloud of opinion completly.
This book was simply too religious for me. It confused me utterly and even Anne made Lestat tell us in one scene if we were still did not understand, then go back and read the scene over again, which I found was a hilarious thing to do because it seemed she just branded her own book confusing. But really, the novel was just way too religious. I know that's what the entire book was to be about, but still, Anne has to remember she is supposed to be writing about her vampires the most, not her own personal opinions on life after death. Honestly I don't know why she wrote such a story in the first place though, I guess it really was just to shock her viewers with this weird new plot.
Mainly this book is about Lestat, the star character of the entire Vamprie Chronicles, and again like in all the Chronicles besides Interview, you see what happens through his eyes as he takes us on quite a trip I found out. What happens is that Lestat is being stalked by this man who soon presents himself to Lestat as Memnoch, a.k.a. the devil. Throughout this entire story from then on the devil mainly tells his story to Lestat as he takes him on a personal voyage through both heaven and hell. I must advise everyone though not to take offense to Anne's writing religious- wise, because one of my friends were. This is just her opinion of what the afterlife is like, she doesn't mean to say her's is the right idea of things. This is just how she sees it. But I am irratated at this sudden profound discussion of religion. Sure Anne makes religion a slight stroke in all her stories, but only slight. This went much more deeper than a slight stroke. When I first read this, I worried severely what she was doing exactly. I mean, was she going all holy on her writing or something? Luckily the Vampire Armand came out and I loved it dearly, and Marius's, Armand's Maker's novel wasn't bad either, but I felt something was lost then from Anne after Memnoch. I'm not really sure what, but none of Anne's novels after Memnoch had the same feeling I once felt with her first four novels. For one reason Lestat never was really the same ever again after Memnoch, for awhile he wasn't even physically moving as will be told from Armand's novel. And when he finally does start to move again which he does, he's a changed man, and that's not in a good way.
So my advice is if you can stand a theme that surrounds Anne's views on religion,and have the patience for a book you sometimes can get a bit lost in, then go on and read it. But it's not really based on anything vampiric but Lestat himself being the star character, following the supposed devil around and listening to his story like some sort of Interview with the Vamprie replica.
In my opinion, Blackwood Farm, a book written way into the future from when Memnoch was written, was the final ring in my opinion that proved Anne was slipping. Memnoch was the first warning years before that we Chronicle followers didn't heed out of hope that more books would come after that matched the loveliness of her first four novels.
But out of all of this, I will say one thing: All of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles are worth reading once. So I do recommend this, just for a mere observation.

This is modern mythmaking at its finest. In the first three books of her Vampire Chronicles, Rice reinvented the vampire for our times. She made them human, made them see their reflections in mirrors, and made them us. I always admired how she managed to commercialize homoeroticism and criticique the Catholic Church ... all the way to the NYT bestseller list. Tale of the Body was sweet, touching change of pace after the epic climax of Queen of the Damned - and didn't prepare me for Memnoch the Devil.
Memnoch is an absolutely ingenius reimagining of JudeoChristain doctrines and texts. Most amazing of all, she came up with cosmic explanations that make far more sense than any of them. Growing up Catholic, the concepts of Heaven and Hell never seemed convincing or logical, and the idea that Jesus HAD to die on the cross for our sins never made any sense at all. THIS version makes much more sense. (And the crucifixtion moved me to tears.)
All in all, WILDLY IMAGINATIVE, STUNNINGLY AMBITIOUS, EMOTIONALLY SATISFYING. A TOWERING ACHIEVEMENT.