I really enjoyed Interview with the Vampire - it was a solid four star read and Claudia was a work of creepy genius. Yet it took me a while to get around to reading the sequel because honestly, Lestat was the least interesting part of Interview for me and I wasn't particularly thrilled at the thought of a whole book focused on nothing but him. Yet in some ways I found Lestat a lot more tolerable here - particularly in the first half of the book. I think it was genuinely clever to have him flat-out state that Louis' story was biased and not entirely accurate, because of course that would be true. Everyone's stories are biased! You would think I'd have the sense to expect that, but I didn't, so well-played to the author there.

It's just that good beginning did not sustain the weight of what followed. The book went on and on and on, a mish-mash of ideas and repetitive angst, and I can't help but think that cut down to half the size this would have been a three star read, maybe even four, but at five hundred and fifty damn pages, I was done long before that. Long before. (When I end up saying out loud to myself, on turning a page, "How much bloody longer?!" I know I've passed liking.) Lestat, again, began to bore me. I'm not surprised his mother left his increasingly tedious arse. Frankly, his repeated assertion that men are more interesting than women is belied by the fact that Gabrielle is the most interesting - perhaps the only really interesting - character of the whole book as far as I'm concerned. I'd far rather have read her story than his.