{"product_id":"blackwood-farm-isbn-9780375411991","title":"Blackwood Farm","description":"\u003cb\u003ePerennial bestseller Anne Rice fuses her two uniquely seductive  strains of narrative—her Vampire legend and her lore of the Mayfair witches—to give us a world of classic deep-south luxury and ancestral secrets.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Welcome to  Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched  gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn  Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelgänger,  “Goblin,” a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can’t escape and that prevents him  from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully  his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelgänger becomes even more vampiric  and terrifying than Quinn himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As the novel moves backwards and forwards in  time, from Quinn’s boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient  Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the  hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar  Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A story of youth and promise, of  loss and the search for love, of secrets and destiny, \u003ci\u003eBlackwood Farm\u003c\/i\u003e is Anne Rice  at her mesmerizing best.“Rice breathes new life into the long-running Vampire Chronicles with the tale of Quinn Blackwood, a young vampire haunted by a menacing doppelganger….Rather than extrapolating from previous Vampire Chronicles, the latest presents a completely fresh story, a gripping gothic yarn that revives the series.” -- \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e”Rice’s books have always had a sexy edge, and she’s not gone stale.” -- \u003ci\u003eMetro Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e (Washington D.C.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“At least as good as Rice’s earliest novels because she centers her story on new characters with interesting stories of their own. Using lush, voluptuous prose, Rice tells a complex and mesmerizing story. Recommended.” -- \u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Blood refreshed for Rice: Vampiric intrigue returns in \u003ci\u003eBlackwood\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cb\u003eBlackwood Farm\u003c\/b\u003e is strong and continues the return to form for Rice that began with \u003cb\u003eMerrick\u003c\/b\u003e.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Denver Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“\u003cb\u003eBlackwood Farm\u003c\/b\u003e is Anne Rice’s best book in years. In fact, it may be necessary to go back to the initial trio of vampire novels to find one that flows with as much grace and continuity. Not only is it beautifully descriptive; it is wonderfully scripted -- with all sorts of unexpected turns…. Rice fires all the weapons in her storyteller’s quiver -- including several kinky, sexually explicit scenes. She uses surprisingly short chapters, most ending with a suspenseful note that practically begs the reader to move on for just one more page.” -- \u003ci\u003eMiami Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Quinn’s story is beautifully haunting. His tale is like a curiosity shop, filled with lovely and unusual things…. There is an intimacy to \u003cb\u003eBlackwood Farm\u003c\/b\u003e that makes readers feel as though they are an important part of Quinn's world. And it's a world they won’t want to leave.” -- \u003ci\u003eDetroit Free Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Classic Anne Rice…hard to put down… Fans of Rice will enjoy this novel, since it is a return to the form that originally drew so many into her bizarre subworld of blood drinkers and witches in the first place.” -- \u003ci\u003eUnited Press International\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003cb\u003eBlackwood Farm\u003c\/b\u003e is a collection of unexpected twists and turns. Rice implements all of her tricks -- spirits, ghosts, vampires, witches, strong family bonds, platonic and forbidden romantic love. The finale should elicit a squeal of excitement from readers who thought Rice was merely going through the motions. Luckily, that lull has passed. \u003cb\u003eBlackwood Farm\u003c\/b\u003e closes with enough unearthed family secrets to fill another novel and a cliffhanger that promises a sequel.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Charlotte Observer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for Anne Rice:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Rice’s strengths as a writer [include] her knack for colourful characters, her loving attention to historical detail [and] her imaginative exploration of myth and mysticism.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Globe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003cb\u003eMerrick\u003c\/b\u003e] is a book where Rice’s two worlds -- of witches and vampires -- finally collide.” -- \u003ci\u003eOttawa Citizen\u003c\/i\u003eANNE RICE is the author of thirty-seven books. She died in 2021.Blackwood Farm\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLestat,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you find this letter in your house in the Rue Royale, and I do sincerely think you will find it—you’ll know at once that I’ve broken your rules.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI know that New Orleans is off limits to Blood Hunters, and that any found there will be destroyed by you. And unlike many a rogue invader whom you have already dispatched, I understand your reasons. You don’t want us to be seen by members of the Talamasca. You don’t want a war with the venerable Order of Psychic Detectives, both for their sake and ours.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut please, I beg you, before you come in search of me, read what I have to say.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy name is Quinn. I’m twenty-two years old, and have been a Blood Hunter, as my Maker called it, for slightly less than a year. I’m an orphan now, as I see it, and it is to you that I turn for help.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut before I make my case, please understand that I know the Talamasca, that I knew them before the Dark Blood was ever given to me, and I know of their inherent goodness and their legendary neutrality as regards things supernatural, and I will have taken great pains to elude them in placing this letter in your flat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat you keep a telepathic watch over New Orleans is plain to me. That you’ll find the letter I have no doubt.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you do come to bring a swift justice to me for my disobedience, assure me please that you will do your utmost to destroy a spirit which has been my companion since I was a child. This creature, a duplicate of me who has grown with me since before I can remember, now poses a danger to humans as well as to myself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet me explain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs a little boy I named this spirit Goblin, and that was well before anyone had told me nursery rhymes or fairy tales in which such a word might appear. Whether the name came from the spirit himself I don’t know. However, at the mere mention of the name, I could always call him to me. Many a time he came of his own accord and wouldn’t be banished. At others, he was the only friend I had. Over the years, he has been my constant familiar, maturing as I matured and becoming ever more skilled at making known to me his wishes. You could say I strengthened and shaped Goblin, unwittingly creating the monster that he is now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe truth is, I can’t imagine existence without Goblin. But I have to imagine it. I have to put an end to Goblin before he metamorphoses into something utterly beyond my control.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy do I call him a monster—this creature who was once my only playmate? The answer is simple. In the months since my being made a Blood Hunter—and understand, I had no choice whatsoever in the matter—Goblin has acquired his own taste for blood. After every feeding, I am embraced by him, and blood is drawn from me into him by a thousand infinitesimal wounds, strengthening the image of him, and lending to his presence a soft fragrance which Goblin never had before. With each passing month, Goblin becomes stronger, and his assaults on me more prolonged.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI can no longer fight him off.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt won’t surprise you, I don’t think, that these assaults are vaguely pleasurable, not as pleasurable to me as feeding on a human victim, but they involve a vague orgasmic shimmer that I can’t deny.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut it is not my vulnerability to Goblin that worries me now. It is the question of what Goblin may become.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow, I have read your Vampire Chronicles through and through. They were bequeathed to me by my Maker, an ancient Blood Hunter who gave me, according to his own version of things, an enormous amount of strength as well.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn your stories you talk of the origins of the vampires, quoting an ancient Egyptian Elder Blood Drinker who told the tale to the wise one, Marius, who centuries ago passed it on to you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhether you and Marius made up some of what was written in your books I don’t know. You and your comrades, the Coven of the Articulate, as you are now called, may well have a penchant for telling lies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut I don’t think so. I’m living proof that Blood Drinkers exist—whether they are called Blood Drinkers, vampires, Children of the Night or Children of the Millennia—and the manner in which I was made conforms to what you describe.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIndeed, though my Maker called us Blood Hunters rather than vampires, he used words which have appeared in your tales. The Cloud Gift he gave to me so that I can travel effortlessly by air; and also the Mind Gift to seek out telepathically the sins of my victims; as well as the Fire Gift to ignite the fire in the iron stove here that keeps me warm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo I believe your stories. I believe in you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI believe you when you say that Akasha, the first of the vampires, was created when an evil spirit invaded every fiber of her being, a spirit which had, before attacking her, acquired a taste for human blood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI believe you when you say that this spirit, named Amel by the two witches who could see him and hear him—Maharet and Mekare—exists now in all of us, his mysterious body, if we may call it that, having grown like a rampant vine to blossom in every Blood Hunter who is made by another, right on up to the present time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI know as well from your stories that when the witches Mekare and Maharet were made Blood Hunters, they lost the ability to see and talk to spirits. And indeed my Maker told me that I would lose mine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut I assure you, I have not lost my powers as a seer of spirits. I am still their magnet. And it is perhaps this ability in me, this receptiveness, and my early refusal to spurn Goblin, that have given him the strength to be plaguing me for vampiric blood now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLestat, if this creature grows ever more strong, and it seems there is nothing I can do to stop him, is it possible that he can enter a human being, as Amel did in ancient times? Is it possible that yet another species of the vampiric root may be created, and from that root yet another vine?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI cannot imagine your being indifferent to this question, or to the possibility that Goblin will become a killer of humans, though he is far from that strength right now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI think you will understand when I say that I’m frightened for those whom I love and cherish—my mortal family—as well as for any stranger whom Goblin might eventually attack.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt’s hard to write these words. For all my life I have loved Goblin and scorned anyone who denigrated him as an “imaginary playmate” or a “foolish obsession.” But he and I, for so long mysterious bedfellows, are now enemies, and I dread his attacks because I feel his increasing strength.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGoblin withdraws from me utterly when I am not hunting, only to reappear when the fresh blood is in my veins. We have no spiritual intercourse now, Goblin and I. He seems afire with jealousy that I’ve become a Blood Hunter. It’s as though his childish mind has been wiped clean of all it once learned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is an agony for me, all of this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut let me repeat: it is not on my account that I write to you. It is in fear of what Goblin may become.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broken yours.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI want you who were kidnapped and made a vampire against your will to look kindly on me because the same thing happened to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI want you to forgive my trespass into your old flat in the Rue Royale, where I hope to hide this letter. I want you to know as well that I haven’t hunted in New Orleans and never will.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd speaking of hunting, I too have been taught to hunt the Evil Doer, and though my record isn’t perfect, I’m learning with each feast. I’ve also mastered the Little Drink, as you so elegantly call it, and I’m a visitor to noisy mortal parties who is never noticed as he feeds from one after another in quick and deft moves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut in the main, my existence is lonely and bitter. If it weren’t for my mortal family, it would be unendurable. As for my Maker, I shun him and his cohorts, and with reason.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat’s a story I’d like to tell you. In fact, there are many stories I want to tell you. I pray that my stories might keep you from destroying me. You know, we could play a game. We meet and I start talking, and slap damn, you kill me when I take a verbal turn you don’t like.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut seriously, Goblin is my concern.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet me add before I close that during this last year of being a fledgling Blood Hunter, of reading your Chronicles and trying to learn from them, I have often been tempted to go to the Talamasca Motherhouse at Oak Haven, outside of New Orleans. I have often been tempted to ask the Talamasca for counsel and help.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I was a boy—and I’m hardly more than that now—there was a member of the Talamasca who was able to see Goblin as clearly as I could—a gentle, nonjudgmental Englishman named Stirling Oliver, who advised me about my powers and how they could become too strong for me to control. I grew to love Stirling within a very short time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI also fell deeply in love with a young girl who was in the company of Stirling when I met him, a red-haired beauty with considerable paranormal power who could also see Goblin—one to whom the Talamasca had opened its generous heart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat young girl is beyond my reach now. Her name is May-fair, a name that is not unfamiliar to you, though this young girl probably knows nothing of your friend and companion Merrick Mayfair, even to this day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut she is most certainly from the same family of powerful psychics—they seem to delight in calling themselves witches—and I have sworn never to see her again. With her considerable powers she would realize at once that something catastrophic has happened to me. And I cannot let my evil touch her in any way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen I read your Chronicles, I was mildly astonished to discover that the Talamasca had turned against the Blood Hunters. My Maker had told me this, but I didn’t believe it until I read it in your books.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt’s still hard for me to imagine that these gentle people have broken one thousand years of neutrality in a warning against all of our kind. They seemed so proud of their benevolent history, so psychologically dependent upon a secular and kindly definition of themselves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eObviously, I can’t go to the Talamasca now. They might become my sworn enemies if I do that. They are my sworn enemies! And on account of my past contact, they know exactly where I live. But more significantly, I can’t seek their help because you don’t want it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou and the other members of the Coven of the Articulate do not want one of us to fall into the hands of an order of scholars who are only too eager to study us at close range.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs for my red-haired Mayfair love, let me repeat that I wouldn’t dream of approaching her, though I’ve sometimes wondered if her extraordinary powers couldn’t help me to somehow put an end to Goblin for all time. But this could not be done without my frightening her and confusing her, and I won’t interrupt her human destiny as mine was interrupted for me. I feel even more cut off from her than I did in the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd so, except for my mortal connections, I’m alone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI don’t expect your pity on account of this. But maybe your understanding will prevent you from immediately annihilating me and Goblin without so much as a warning.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat you can find both of us I have no doubt. If even half the Chronicles are true, it’s plain that your Mind Gift is without measure. Nevertheless, let me tell you where I am.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy true home is the wooden Hermitage on Sugar Devil Island, deep in Sugar Devil Swamp, in northeastern Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi border. Sugar Devil Swamp is fed by the West Ruby River, which branches off from the Ruby at Rubyville.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcres of this deep cypress swamp have belonged to my family for generations, and no mortal ever accidentally finds his way in here to Sugar Devil Island, I’m certain of it, though my great-great-great-grandfather Manfred Blackwood did build the house in which I sit, writing to you now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur ancestral home is Blackwood Manor, an august if not overblown house in the grandest Greek Revival style, replete with enormous and dizzying Corinthian columns, an immense structure on high ground.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300109045989,"sku":"NP9780375411991","price":26.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375411991.jpg?v=1767722736","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/blackwood-farm-isbn-9780375411991","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}