[OBIT] Anne Rice, dead at 80

An 80 year old diabetic dying,  doesn’t convince me there is any kind of cause and effect from getting vaccinated 9 months ago.

Totally. One must question memes that are out there online, and wonder about disinfo. My uncle had a stroke at half her age. There is so much stuff in the news and it kind of adds up. Demaryius Thomas of Denver Broncos at 33 had a seizure. WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange has reportedly suffered a stroke in jail at 50. At lot of old people die of covid and when people said they had Comorbidity, there was this insistence that it was covid. Would think that covid would cause sever harm in the elderly. What sucks is when there is money attached to ventilator deaths and things like that.

@xdax thanks so much for mentioning that. Never heard of it. I did enjoy Queen of The Damned. None of her other books I liked, but she wrote well.  Off topic, but one female writer that supposedly was like her, but better, was Tanith Lee. Tanith Lee is another author I’d like to binge, but I’ve heard she can be kind of disturbing, as is any writer that messes with dark forces.

https://gizmodo.com/anne-rice-just-changed-everything-you-thought-you-knew-1789485758

Aliens.

Aliens have arrived in The Vampire Chronicles. Well, more specifically, they arrived thousands of years ago, but they are hugely responsible for the existence of all vampires, as well as Atlantis.

Before Realms of Atlantis, Lestat and his brethren only knew that the vampire’s curse came to be when a bloodthirsty spirit named Amel possessed the ancient Egyptian queen Akasha (the titular Queen of the Damned). It is Amel’s spirit that can be passed from vampire to vampire, connecting them all, and giving vampires their powers and weaknesses. In Prince Lestat (2014), it’s discovered that Amel is still conscious in this neural vampire network, but primarily residing in the spiritual core of the vampires… which Lestat has absorbed after the defeat of Akasha.

But Amel is not a spirit… at least not originally. As Realms reveals, he is also the founder of Atlantis, a coastal city of unbelievably advanced technology, around 10,000 years ago. The reason he’s so smart is because he was abducted by aliens named Bravennans, modified, and sent to Earth for reasons I won’t spoil. When he rebels the aliens destroy Atlantis, and Amel somehow becomes a spirit, but he also fuses with a special Atlantean technology that ends up forming the essence of everything that makes a vampire a vampire—an essence that can be measured and altered scientifically.

I don’t expect everyone to like Rice’s massive, massive alteration to her mythos, but I genuinely enjoyed the book, and I loved the audacity of it. It was fascinating to see the classic, gothic world of Lestat suddenly, completely upended—but also to see the vampires engaging and embracing the modern world, forming a real community, and, most of all, discovering that their existence, which they once thought to be a divine curse, is actually the result of science—otherworldly science, but science all the same. (And guys? There are so many more surprises I didn’t spoil.)

I liked her earlier books. Things got ridiculous after the 4th Vampire book. RIP.