The novel opens in typically glamorous Rice style. In a Paris cafe sits a vampire, with long brown hair and skin like marble, writing the story of her life and how she came by the "Dark Gift" that made her immortal. Pandora starts life as the accomplished and bold Lydia, only daughter of a rich Roman senator during the time of Augustus Caesar. Twice she meets the snowy-haired Celt Marius, but her father forbids her from marrying him. After falling out of favour with the new emperor Tiberius, her family are slaughtered for suspected treason and she flees with the family's riches and the dying wish of her father echoing in her ears: "Live, Lydia."

Lydia does indeed live. She sails for Antioch, where she adopts the Greek name Pandora so she won't be recognised, and goes about setting up a life for herself, purchasing slaves and getting involved in public debates about Ovid, Lucretius and Epicurus. But all is not well. Pandora is haunted by ghastly dreams of blood thirst and an ancient Egyptian goddess. It seems a charred and dying blood-drinker known simply as "the burnt one" is preying on the citizens of Antioch. The local cult of Isis has already called in an expert, a tall hooded man, to help. Pandora meets this man and discovers it is Marius, her childhood love. But Marius is changed - his skin gleams, he has not aged in fifteen years, and he only comes out at night. And we all know what that means.

Rice has often been criticised for writing overblown, repetitive, purple prose. But her baroque style is perfect for the Gothic tales she tells. Layers of colour, of sound and smell, are folded one on top of another lovingly. It's an invitation to indulge. Reading an Anne Rice book is like eating chocolate-dipped cherries in a candlelit bubble-bath, and washing them down with a glass of good red while a Debussy CD plays in the background. It might make you feel a bit sick and headachy, but you love every moment of it.

Pandora's initiation into immortality is accompanied by a similar kind of heightened sense experience to the one which Rice so expertly imparts to her readers: "a veil was lifted that had all my life hung between me and all things.... I heard water dropping from the flowers. Tiny drops striking the marble floor, the fall of a single leaf.... I heard the breeze move under the golden canopied ceiling. And the lamps had tongues of flame to sing." Her prose makes vampires of us all. In among the lush and beautiful descriptions, however, lurk moments of violence and revulsion, all the more potent because they come when the readers' senses are open and stimulated. These moments of "mingled and inexplicable beauty and horror" are Rice's trademark: "I twisted to see his face. It was like that of a long-dead corpse dried in the desert, burnt black with a spine of a nose, and arched lips that seemed quite unable to close over white teeth and the two fangs he bared now as he looked at me."

In places, the short format of the novel works against the potential scope of the story. It's a little rushed, but ultimately still satisfying. Pandora is a complex and appealing character, and it's nice to have a female vampire to bond with for a change (some of us were getting a little tired of Lestat). Pandora is recommended reading for all lovers of the strange and beautiful. It's a gorgeous adventure.

(© Kim Wilkins 1998)