BOOK REVIEW: [Blackwood Farm by Anne Rice](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345443683/mattorama) [](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553714171/mattorama) I have no shame in admitting that I used to read, and very much enjoy, Anne Rice's books (I also read Tom Clancy books for awhile in my late teen years as long as I'm getting embarrasing reading habits out in the open). Unlike most of her readers, I always liked her Mayfair witch books a lot more than the vampire books. The last Mayfair book ended on a real cliffhanger so for years I waited for her to move away from the vampires, which had gotten horribly repetitive and in dire need of a strong editor to trim the fat (right when she got a huge book contract coincedentally), and finish up the witch story. A few years ago I read that Anne Rice had said she wasn't going to write any more witch books, which pissed me off I have to say. After not paying any attention to her books for a few years I happened to find out that her two newest books are the continuation of both the Mayfair saga and the vampire books. Yay! I said. Then I read [Blackwood Farm](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345443683/mattorama) (or rather, listened to it as an audiobook). Yikes! I said.

If I didn’t have a unread shelf the length of both my arms, I would reread one of the old Rice books I enjoyed so much (I read The Witching Hour in almost one sitting, a feat for such a huge book) to see if it is as bad as this new one and I didn’t know any better. I feel about this book the same way I did when I finally accepted the fact that The Simpsons had gone downhill in quality so severely. Now I see what everybody has always said about Anne Rice’s books. It hurts me to think about how terrible this book was. The characters are annoying, even Lestat. The whole book is basically backstory and I would have skipped half of it if I had been reading the book and not listening to it. And just to rub salt in the wound, the cliffhanger from the last Mayfair witch book is basically blown off and the character shows up to be the lame love interest of the narrator. Bleh. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that this book was really written by a bad Anne Rice fan-fiction writer and she just put her name on it. Every stereotypical item on a Bad Anne Rice-style Slash Fiction checklist is here, even a hermaphrodite vampire and gay sex with a ghost (which I just realized turns out to be incest as well) for god’s sake.

Anne Rice fans have probably already read this book so there’s no helping them but if you haven’t decided about it, please run away from this book. If you want to read some good Anne Rice books, read the Mayfair books and even some of the vampire books (I don’t remember the titles but the ones from the third one to Memnoch the Devil were great). Then after you’ve read those, stop. Don’t even look at any of the “vampire biography” books from the past few years. What makes me the most angry about how damn lame this book was is that the sequel is supposed to wrap up everything for both the vampires and the witches. I can’t stand that my literary completist nature means that I’ll probably read the sequel just to get the end of the story and I’ll probably be suffering every minute of the way.