BLACKWOOD FARM

By Anne Rice

Fuck Tarquinn "Quinn" Blackwood, the bisexual, ghost fucking, vampire-tranny-dick-and-blood-sucking, cum gargling, Southern millionaire and avowed lover of Mona Mayfair, heiress to the Mayfair fortune. That needs saying, right out the gate. He's a terrible narrator, a whiny, petulant, gothic wimp, and the only terror he inspires is the fear that I might get trapped in a room with him for five hundred pages and have to listen to him bitch.

In the past the novels of Ann Rice, especially Blood and Gold, the highly anticipated and hugely disappointing tale of Marius, made me wonder if her husbands brain cancer was contagious. She was starting to write worse than her cerebrally challenged, nepotistic son (nothing could be worse than her husband's retarded poetry). Long sections of her work were devoted to overly emotional, drama fag outbursts, or uninspired, inconsequential dialogue, or lengthy descriptions of the frilly lace on the cuff of the eighteenth century shirt that some lame vampire was wearing. WHO FUCKING CARES?! STICK TO THE FUCKING PLOT YOU TALENTLESS HACK!!! I screamed after I chucked Blood and Gold across the room, swearing that I would never again read another faggy Ann Rice vampire novel. Then came Blackwood Farm, with promises of the Mayfair witches from the Witching Hour series, a series that, regardless of her decline, still holds merit for me. I'd be remiss if I didn't admit that I'm overly fond of it, not just for subject matter, but for style and content as well. It just seems ever since Violin, Rice has fallen into a dark, inky well, with slick, slimy walls, and has been slowly and laboriously climbing her way out with adjectives and her teeth.

I'm not going to lie to you, there is some of this in Blackwood Farm, all right, quite a bit, but there is a lot worth reading for too. Like what you ask? How about Lestat's return and a mention that while he was catatonic after Memnoch the Devil that angels began to kidnap him and force him to do their dirty work for them? How about Lestat telling Quinn he's a Goth? How about Mona Mayfair and Rowan and Michael and Oncle Julian the ghost making an appearance? How about sex with ghosts, gay and straight, and exorcisms and Merrick? How about dead twin brothers and junkie mothers with AIDS and murder in the Louisiana swamps and trailer trash redemption songs? How about violent spirits seeking revenge and unprecedented wealth and dirty family secrets being exposed and sex with hot red heads? No? How about some more of the Talamasca?

Rice pretty much panders to every market she's discovered reads her so I guess those book signings have paid off well. The novel leaps out the gate, knocking your breath out, then lurches around showing off it's magnificence and arrogantly demanding your awe, then falls off into a timid, exacerbated crawl of pointless, trite, gay dialogue as the steam of it's many plaguerized plots dries out, only to steadily accelerate again into a resounding, sonorous crescendo that, while artless, is nonetheless oddly hope inspiring. You read that right, baby. Essentially she sounds like Ann Rice knocking off classic Ann Rice, like watered down sloe gin over melting ice milk, like a warm, comfortable, well-loved shoe with a huge hole in the bottom stepping into a cold puddle. If you've got fuzzy socks on for this read, you won't mind so much.

Although some of the characters were under developed and much of the dialogue was insidiously childish and two dimensional and the story was uneven and the plot had gaping holes in it's map and the writing lacked wit, timbre, intellect, and sophistication, I still found myself drawn to finish this story. My socks weren't made by NASA, but they were heavily insulated.

Deep in the same bayou described by Harry Crews or better still Poppy Z. Brite from her marvelous Exquisite Corpse, near the Sugar Devil Swamp, lies Blackwood Manor, built by a decadent, distant relative, and home, for the course of the narration, to the tale's effeminate narrator, the aforementioned, and slighted, Tarquin Blackwood. Quinn, as he prefers to be called, is haunted by a spirit named Goblin, a spirit doppelganger, that cannot be seen by his other relatives, but fuels much of the teen angst for the decadent Blackwood heir. With an inordinate fortune awaiting him, Quinn, or "Little Lord Fontleroy" as his bitchy, junkie, HIV infected, wannabe country music star mother calls him, enjoys a wealth of decadent fantasies, from culinary delights prepared by in house Creole slaves, to the slave workers themselves, sampling his childhood mulatto nanny. After Rice has her narrator betray every sense of moral decency she can feebly conjure, Quinn becomes embroiled with his unconvincingly precocious15-year-old nymphomaniac cousin Mona Mayfair, from the Mayfair coven of witches detailed in the Witching Hour series. But once Quinn is made into a Blood Hunter by Petronia, a cruel and unmerciful, hermaphroditic vampire who inhabits a retreat created within treacherous family swampland, he loses all control over his jealous Goblin who truculently insists on stealing freshly feed blood from him. Goblin is addicted to fusing with the spirit inside the vampire blood and Quinn risks his life to contact Lestat and enlist his help in destroying Goblin once and for all. In between all of this are lengthy family battles, ridiculous contemporary references, blush inducing sex scenes with the living and the dead, and page upon page of thinly constructed ancillary plot lines that ultimately do more to distract the reader and frustrate them than to illucidate the characters. One has to wonder where are Rice's editors and what do they use the galleys for?

The sections with Mona Mayfair really got me going and became the highlights of the novel for me mostly because I want to fuck her so bad I can taste her in my mouth. I love red heads and I love witches and I've always found Rice's portrayal of them to be highly accurate to what real "witchline" generational families are like. She does not disappoint on this front, even if it is highly implausible that Tarquin and Mona, respectively eighteen and fifteen, would have lengthy discourses on Trappist Monks and fifth century philosophy with each of them immediately and unquestioningly understanding the other's obscure references.

Likewise Lestat's return as an active character was a welcome addition to this novel, despite the fact that Rice's characterization portrayed him to be more whimsical and limpwristed than a Liza Minnelli impersonator at a Barbara Striessand concert. Rice's little dirty trick of dropping the hint of a new Lestat novel worked well enough for me and so I'm condemned to wallowing through another tome of vampiric self-loathing and sexual ambivalence to see if it's true.

Here's the bottom line; Ann Rice fans are a bunch of delusion idiots, just like Star Trek convention fans, and if you're one of them, you've probably read this thing a dozen times by now and even though you're cussing me out right now for sacrilege, deep in the back of your mind you know that everything I'm saying is true. If you're not a Rice fan, don't start here. Go to the Witching Hour. How many times do I have to tell you that? If this is Ann Rice reading this, you need a new editor, and maybe a good writing workshop course. You can workshop anonymously online at Zoetrope and that might be a big help. You also need to avoid ripping off other people's ideas and stop pandering to what you think your readers want to hear. Trust me, you'll thank me for this later, once you've rewritten that horrible next novel into a brilliant return piece. Listen, take it from a nobody that lives in the basement of his mom's house in the petroleum and refined chemicals state, you're no Palahniuk, DeLillo, Coupland, Pynchon, Easton Ellis, or Bukowski and you never will be, but with enough polish, you might just put a twinkle in our eyes, and that's worth more than seeing your name on the New York Time's Best Sellers List any day. Capice?