"I want to be a saint. I want to save the whole world." Lestat actually says this. Out loud. To us. Breaking the fourth wall like he's hosting a vampire TED talk. And I'm sitting in my driveway at 7:45 AM after a twelve-hour shift where I literally held pressure on a femoral bleed for twenty minutes, and this centuries-old immortal is having an existential crisis about wanting to be good.
I laughed so hard I woke up the neighbor's dog.
Lestat's Having a Midlife Crisis and He Wants You to Know About It
Look, I've been with the Vampire Chronicles since I was a nursing student reading Interview with the Vampire under my covers with a penlight because my roommate had an 0600 clinical. I loved Lestat. The arrogance, the swagger, the absolute refusal to apologize for anything. But Blood Canticle Lestat? This is Lestat after too many therapy sessions and not enough blood. He's chatty. He's self-deprecating. He addresses you, the reader, directly - multiple times - in this breathless, almost manic way that feels less like the Prince of Darkness and more like your coworker who cornered you in the break room to explain why they're going vegan.
The plot picks up right where Blackwood Farm left off, merging Rice's two big universes - the vampires and the Mayfair witches. Mona Mayfair is dying, so naturally Lestat turns her. Rowan Mayfair is drawn to Lestat in ways that make her husband Michael Curry very uncomfortable. There's a ghost named Patsy who needs saving, a 5,000-year-old Taltos named Ash Templeton, and Julian Mayfair haunting Lestat for turning his niece. It's a lot. It's a LOT. And at 11 and a half hours, it somehow feels both overstuffed and undercooked - like Rice crammed two books worth of characters into a space that couldn't hold them, then rushed through the resolutions.
Compared to the earlier Chronicles - Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned - this feels like a different series entirely. Those books had weight. Gothic atmosphere so thick you could chew it. Blood Canticle reads more like Lestat's personal blog. The only other book that gave me that same bone-deep, atmosphere-first dread recently was Them Bones — not vampires, not even close, but it understood that horror lives in the weight of a place, not the pace of a plot. And I say that with love, because I genuinely enjoyed parts of it. The Mayfair-vampire crossover concept is fascinating. Mona's transformation has real emotional stakes. But Rice keeps pulling focus back to Lestat's philosophical wandering, his yearning for sainthood, his internal monologues about God and goodness - and after a while it starts to feel like charting the same assessment over and over. I'm writing the same note, just with fancier vocabulary.
David Pittu Commits to the Bit (For Better and Worse)
Here's where it gets interesting. David Pittu's narration is... a choice. And I mean that in the way we say "that's a choice" at the nurses' station when a resident orders something questionable. He gives Lestat this effete, almost simpering quality - dripping with self-absorption, every sentence delivered like Lestat knows he's performing for an audience. Which, honestly? Is textually accurate. Lestat IS performing. He IS self-absorbed. Pittu understood the assignment.
But eleven and a half hours of that voice is a commitment. By hour six, I was ready for literally anyone else to narrate. Rowan, Michael, Mona - give me a different perspective, a different vocal energy. Instead, everything filters through Lestat's particular brand of theatrical introspection, and Pittu doesn't differentiate the other characters enough to give your ears a break. It's like being stuck in a room with one very charismatic, very exhausting person who won't let you talk.
That said - and this surprised me - there are moments where Pittu's delivery genuinely lands. When Lestat grapples with what he's done to Mona, when the self-awareness cracks through the performance, Pittu lets something vulnerable slip in. Those moments almost make the rest worth it. Almost.
Who's Going to Love This (And Who Should Quietly Walk Away)
If you've read every Vampire Chronicle and every Mayfair book and you need to see these worlds collide? You'll get something out of this. It's not nothing. The lore connections are there, and completists will appreciate the callbacks.
But if you're new to Rice? This is not where you start. Not even close. And if you loved early Lestat - the dangerous, magnetic Lestat of the first few books - brace yourself, because this is a fundamentally different character. Whether that's growth or regression depends on your tolerance for vampire existentialism.
I sped this up to 1.25x around hour four and honestly it improved the experience. Tightened the pacing, made Lestat's monologues feel less like he was savoring every syllable of his own brilliance.
Post-Shift Prescription
Carlos asked why I looked annoyed when I came in this morning. I told him Lestat was getting on my nerves. He said, "The vampire?" like that was a weird thing to say. Fifteen years of marriage and the man still doesn't understand my relationship with fictional characters.
Blood Canticle is a frustrating book wrapped in gorgeous mythology. Rice clearly loved these characters - maybe too much to put them through the kind of conflict that makes great fiction. And Pittu's narration is polarizing in the way that only a fully committed performance can be. I didn't hate it. But I kept thinking about how much better it could've been, and that's worse than hating something. Night shift verdict: it got me home, but I won't be re-listening.
