I enjoyed the first half of the book which shows Armand's life before becoming a vampire, the circumstances that caused Marius to make him one at an age younger than he had wished, but the second half for me was bogged down in religious blahblahblah that I didn't find interesting or thought-provoking. They are things Rice has brought up before in her other books. I find these bog down the story. Her writing has always been voluptuously delicious. I love her descriptions of Renaissance Italy. I am no prude, by any means, but sometimes her descriptions of younger boys and girls, teens and tweens make me uncomfortable. I know in this era, things were different, but her descriptions in many instances aren't called for.

I believe I only own one more book in the vampire series, but after this, I think I am done with Rice. I have so many books to read, that I don't have times for ones that I don't enjoy to the fullest. I LOVED Interview with the Vampire, but each successive book I liked less and less. :( ( )

Also a very good book... ( )

Fills in Armand's life. The movie really put me off Armand but this novel set it back on track. Not as engrossing as the first three vampire novels but an okay read. ( )

Anne Rice is the author to go to when you want to read a really good vampire novel. Not the type of vampire novels where vampires sparkle and are just too over the top (eye roll). This is vampires done well, with all the rich details and history to go along with them. I love this series and need to pick it back up again - I've gotten stuck on this one and need to push through it!

Armand until now has played a small role in the Vampire Chronicles. Here he assumes center stage, relating his five hundred years of life to fledgling vampire David Talbot, who plays amanuensis to Armand as he did to Lestat ... It's not just the epic plot but Rice's voluptuary worldview that's the main attraction ... Elegant narrative has always been her hallmark ... Rice is equally effective in showing how Armand eventually loses his religion and becomes "the vagabond angel child of Satan," living under Paris cemeteries and foundling the Grand Guignol-ish Theatre des Vampires. In the twentieth century, a rehabilitated Armand regains faith but falls in love with two children who save his life. By the conclusion of Armand, the pupil has become the mentor.

After a very long hiatus, I recently got back into Anne Rice, having read the first three books of THE VAMPIRE CHORNICLES many years ago. In THE VAMPIRE ARMAND, she takes one of her secondary characters from those books and gives him the center stage, letting him tell his story to the fledging vampire David Talbot in the wake of the events from MEMNOCH THE DEVIL. This book was written back in 1998, after Rice herself had stayed away from her beloved creatures of the night for a few years, but she clearly knew what her fans wanted, and most of all, liked in her fiction, so she went back to dancing with the ones who brought her. Only this dance was not with Lestat, her most famous and popular character, but with Armand, a teenage vampire with the face of an angel. What she was doing was obvious, expanding her vampire universe and seeing if she could do it without relying on, and in the process, exhausting, her most popular character.

How good were the results? I think this book will certainly please die hard Rice fans, for all the stuff she does well in on display here, including her mastery of characterization; her ability to make bygone cultures come to life on her pages, and not only that, but long vanished cities and places return in vivid detail. There are arcs in ARMAND that are Rice the story teller at her best, especially in first half, where Armand narrates how he was kidnapped as a child in medieval Russia and sold into slavery in Constantinople, only to be rescued by the ancient vampire Marius, who was once a Roman senator, and brought to the Venice of the Renaissance, where he lives in a house filled with other boys such as himself. How Armand comes to receive the Dark Gift and a subsequent trip back to Russia with Marius, where he is very briefly reunited with his grieving parents, is Rice at her best. In the other books, we have always seen Armand through the eyes of Lestat and Louis, but here we see him in full, and learn that he is truly a damaged child, eternally in search of the love he lost when the home of his maker was destroyed by fanatical blood drinkers. Attempts to find it in a coven underneath Rome, and later in Paris with Lestat, do not work out. Later, in the aftermath of the events of MEMNOCH, a badly burned and injured Armand is rescued by two precocious human children named Sybelle and Benji, and he has a chance to find love and a family once again, but this being Anne Rice, she throws in another twist before the resolution in the last pages.

And if the best of Anne Rice is on display, some of her worst faults can be found in ARMAND as well, starting with her well known penchant for over description, making sure we know everything about every crook and nanny of every house, hovel, palace, basement, and back room, it is a wonder she doesn’t describe the interior of the rat’s holes. Rice’s characters always talk a lot, her chatty undead are a staple that many love about her books, but boy do they talk here, as some scenes run on pages longer than they should. In the second half, there are long arguments about faith, philosophy, the nature of man and the mind of God, and what Christ meant. This has always been seen as Rice working out her own views on God and religion and man, and while I do not have a problem with it, I can see how this might try the patience of many readers. Some have noted that Rice was so successful at this point in her career that she no longer had an editor when she wrote this book, if it is true, then it certainly shows. Also, the ever present homo eroticism is not everyone’s cup of tea, and the part of the book concerning the Roman vampire Marius and his house filled with boys may make some uncomfortable in what it implies, but this is Rice portraying an older, and distinctly non Christian culture.

In the end, I found Armand to be good company, and an excellent narrator, treating the reader as an equal, as someone worthy enough to share his story with. There have been preparations for a TV series based on THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES, and I am sure that sooner or later, it will come to pass. When this happens, hopefully, they will do justice to Armand’s side of the story. ( )

This was my favorite book by Anne Rice. I absolutely fell in love with Armand. All of her books are amazing, but Armand is my favorite character. ( )

Gay vampire sex, Armand gets duped into joining/leading a cult, Lestat fucks shit up (as usual), Armand and Marius make amends. The end. Not her best work by any means. ( )

I was seduced. Another time the lesson was learned. NEVER read anything outside the privacy of your home for the first time. You never know what emotions lay in a book. You never know how you might be affected. ( )

Good Rice and a good narrator for a good tale. Of all the vampire tales, and other than _Lestat_, this is my fave. ( )

This was my third attempt at novels in this series, and I have come to the conclusion that the first one I read and the only one I enjoyed, Interview with the Vampire, exhausted my interest in vampires as a whole. This book again attempts sympathetic characters, and perhaps there is nothing really wrong with them for a person who continues to be interested in vampire existential angst. I just couldn't care about the spiritual journey of a vampire. There were a few brief moments of interest, such as before it is clear what is happening to Andrei, at the beginning, when his life is shown in tragic circumstances but with the more innocent perspective of not being a vampire. I did try to be interested. ( )

I grow weary of La Rice. It's all the same now and way too talky. She's getting preachy as well. Too much of her personal religion is showing through. A Christian vampire -- yeah, right. ( )

It is Armand’s turn to recount his history to David to be recorded for posterity

If Lestat and Louis’s books are digitised, he could always just copy and paste the relevant sections.

I am not a fan of this book, there’s very little about if I find even remotely enjoyable and the few steps forwards it takes are so overwhelmed with problems as to make whatever progress it made completely irrelevant. This book was not a fun read, it was a boring read and, more than anything else, it was an unnecessary read

Which underpins the main problem with this book – it’s unnecessary in many ways. Firstly, The Vampire Chronicles is already a grossly over written series with a truly unnecessary amount of back story for the tiny crumbs of actual plot and present day happenings we have been given. I know more about Louis than I needed to, but at least Interview with a Vampire existed to introduce the world. I know every last teeny tiny detail about Lestat, but at least he is a central figure in the plot. I know Marius’s background in painful length but at least he is, somewhat, a foundation for the other characters in a rather convoluted manner. Even Meheret dropped in for a dreadfully long story time of her history

This is a lot of unnecessary back story already for a very limited plot. It doesn’t need yet another book full of back story with no actual present day storyline; enough with this endless, long winded recitation of their pasts! Recounting of history is not a substitute for plot

But this unnecessariness is compounded by the fact that this is Armand! I know some people are big fans of Armand – but honestly I have no idea why. Armand hasn’t been relevant to the plot line since Louis left him after burning down his theatre. Armand has had no significant presence in any of the dramatic events of Akasha waking up, or Lestat playing body switching or Lestat’s appalling navel gazing theology – nor did he really start a storyline of his own in this book. Armand is completely irrelevant to current events and this book did nothing to make him relevant. Nor has he ever actually been relevant!

This is shown by this book, he was a brief stopping point in Marius’s, Louis’s and Lestat’s history – a permanent side character in all their lives. The book even lampshades it:

“How can I tell you about something that doesn’t interest me? Is it supposed to interest you? The problem is that too much has been written about my past already.”

I don't know Armand, is it supposed to interest me? Because it didn’t. And yes, every remotely interesting moment in Armand’s life had already been covered in previous books; Armand had nothing useful to add and did nothing useful or interesting outside of those moments. It is repetition with another repetitive story of being a young vampire and Armand and Marius tacked on (the basics of which we already knew). This character is irrelevant! His story is already told! His history is already known! Why are we repeating this?

For padding we have prose that sets record for purpleness even among Anne Rice’s work – and that’s already a screaming magenta – gross over-descriptiveness and yet more theological and ethical rambling. I would say there are seminary text books that contain less theological navel gazing than this vampire series, except all we really do is circle the same, few, narrow abouts about good, evil and aesthetic over and over and over again, from book to book, every vampire has the same tired theological moping over interminable pages of pseudo-philosophical claptrap. At the end, the plot line is running so thin that we actually have a chapter of just describing the other vampires; because we really need Armand to sum up Louis, Lestat, Marius et al?

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I'm completely unable to like this book. I just can't. I only read it because I'm a fan of Anne Rice's Vampires' series. I was never really Armand's fan and this book only made me hate him even more. I even tried to see the story through his and Marius' point of view, but no matter how beautiful may be the story of a mature man trapped in a angel-like boy, the constant and exhaustive repetition of this fact is simply annoying. Armand himself thinks he is too much of an adult, but during the WHOLE BOOK his acts contradict his thoughts. And there are too many things that Armand does that you just can't understand and not even his moments of supposedly "insanity" explain, unlike what happens with Lestat.

The little flashback scenes of the red-haired baby-vampire were only enough to increase my hatred towards this childish character, that did nothing more than cry for his master during more than half of the book (so that he would abandon him for no plausible reason). The only thing that made me want to finish reading this book was nearly the ending, when he finally realizes his own mistakes.

Absolutely awful. I'd even read VIOLIN again, but won't ever want to look at this book ever again. ( )

I'm not sure if it's because of the recent chaos going on in my life or if this book really wasn't that great... It bored me. It couldn't hold my attention at all. This book took me longer to read than any of the rest of the series has.

I did like some of the imagery in this book, but at points there was so much imagery I forgot what the plotline was in the time it took me to read the descriptive paragraphs... ( )

After a not-so-impressive (to me) story of Memnoch the Devil, Rice has drawn me back in with Armand telling his story. He goes back to when he first met Marius, his time as a coven leader, the Theater of the Vampires, all the way to modern times when he saw the Veil.

A definite good read! ( )

After a not-so-impressive (to me) story of Memnoch the Devil, Rice has drawn me back in with Armand telling his story. He goes back to when he first met Marius, his time as a coven leader, the Theater of the Vampires, all the way to modern times when he saw the Veil.

A definite good read! ( )

Lestat lies in a coma-like sleep in a chapel and while vampires gathers around him, Armand tells his story to David Talbot, Lestat’s former Talamascan fledgling. Armand takes us with him through his childhood in Kiev; from where he is kidnapped and sold to slavery, to Venice where Marius saves him and eventually gives the dark gift and to Paris where he led his Satanic Vampire cult.

Maybe I should start this telling that this was 4th or 5th time reading this and yep, I still love it! Armand’s always been my favourite so it’s no surprise I love this.
It’s been over 8 years since I’ve last read this, and long before I had even heard about blogs etc., so it was interesting to read it again. And it seems my book taste hasn’t changed since I was 15… And oh why it’s so hard to write about books you loved!

When Armand lived in Kiev as a child he painted beautiful icons and was meant to join the monks so he had pretty religious upbringing, which shows through his life and is constant theme through the book.

I’ve always loved the chapter where Marius takes Armand back to Kiev after turning him. He could let the past go little after meeting his family and his father who was such a huge presence in his life.

They didn’t have that many years together with Marius but it was a big part of his life when he was loved and (relatively) safe. And I was dreading to reach the part where it would all be ruined!
It’s been told in previous books that he was the leader of the vampire cult that imprisoned Lestat but now we see how he became part of it.

You can see the growing theme with Christianity on Rice’s books here and while I’m not even remotely religious it didn’t bother me. I love the writing style and the descriptive writing but that may not be to everyone’s liking. ( )

With Lestat in a coma, Anne continues the stories of her beloved vampires, this one centering around the beautiful Russian vampire, Armand. As always, Anne brings in actual historical facts and events into her stories, which makes her books even more interesting to read.

A very good book and very historically fresh. I recommend it. ( )

Armand is one of the more interesting vampires, but I'm getting a bit tired of this series. ( )

The reader is taken on a journey seeing this time through the eye's of Armand, the beautiful boy vampire of over 500 years old. His life story is unfolded and a better grasp is discovered as to why he lived the way he did as a coven leader under the tombs of Paris for 300+ years. He is overcome by Veronica's veil which Lestat brought back from Hell and goes into the sun only to be saved by the love he has for two mortals. At times the book is very sexually explicit. ( )

Aaaaah, Armand. I absolutely LOVE Armand's story. Brought into the blood by Marius, only after a childhood full of tragedy and pain, Armand is one of the most well spoken vampires. The passion shared between Master and pupil is breathtaking, and the narrative is full of philosophy and art. ( )

My favorite Vampire Chronicle. Armand is the best vampire in the series. I was ecstatic to get a book devoted to him. ( )

Not a good book. I couldn't get past the first half. ( )