The Vampire Armand

The Vampire Armand is a novel by the American writer Anne Rice, published in 1998 and the sixth book of The Vampire Chronicles.

The story is told as a retrospective, in the same manner as the earlier volumes, so the reader is walking through one character's memory of four centuries, and Armand is the most difficult of Rice's vampires to like: he is an opportunist who knows it, a believer in several things in succession, and a survivor who has been owned by other people for most of his life. In Venice he is bought by the vampire Marius de Romanus, who renames him Amadeo and keeps a household of apprentices; the arrangement gives him comfort, education and affection of a kind, and the book is honest about how easily that becomes another form of possession. After the mortal life in the painting workshop is taken from him, he is remade as a vampire and spends the centuries after that in and out of covens, which is how he eventually arrives at the point where the reader first met him. Rice had by then written several of the volumes through first-person recollections, and this one returns to that method after Memnoch the Devil had pushed the series into theology.