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

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.

Rereading again because Rice reread Frankenstein to write this and I'm having a Frankenstein reread summer