Laura Eppinger’s Reviews > The Tale of the Body Thief > Status Update

The only thing I remembered about this one was Lestat seducing a nun. It's still the best part and the best-written. The first half of the book should just be cut. The will they won't-they with David Talbot is also very good!

This could really be brilliant and sensual, and I guess at one point I thought it was. But it is mostly boring fat to trim.

Literally chapter two should have been the actual body switch. Then we get to the shame of a body that needs to piss, that gets cold damp feet in the snow, that hungers and needs money to stay fed and warm and safe. A fevered delirium. All the horrors of being mortal!

Correction: it takes fully a third of the book for body snatching to actually happen. Lots of sad walks around New Orleans, arguing with Louis in a church, cleaning up clutter in Louis's house.

This could still be cut down by a quarter at least, but man do I miss the times when Anne Rice let her work be edited. It's soooooo much better than the ancient aliens era to come.

We don't get the body snatching till a quarter of the way in. It's about God and the Devil, Rembrandt's genius, hunting wild game... Erotic conversations and wanting someone you can't have.