The Tale of the Body Thief

The Tale of the Body Thief was published in 1992 and is the fourth novel in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, following The Queen of the Damned. Chapters from the book appeared in Playboy in October 1992, which says something about how large Rice's audience was by then. Rice had published Interview with the Vampire in 1976 and had spent the intervening years building a fictional world that runs from eighteenth-century France to the present day.

The novel is a body-swap story with a vampire in it, and Rice uses the device to answer a question her readers had been asking since the first book: what would Lestat do if he could be human again? The answer involves weakness, hunger, a hospital, a series of humiliations and a long section in which the most powerful character in the series has no powers at all. The thief, Raglan James, is written as a professional who has thought the plan through, and Rice gives him the technical competence that makes the trade plausible.

Lestat narrates in the first person, as he does throughout the later Chronicles, and the voice is the reason readers stay with him: arrogant, funny and honest about his own stupidity. Rice went on to write further Lestat novels, and the series has been adapted for film and, more recently, for television. This is the fourth of thirteen Chronicles novels and is not a starting point.

The body-swap plot gives Rice the chance to write a vampire story with a human in the middle of it, hungry, breakable and unrecognisable to the people looking for him.