Rating
4.0

I read a lot of books, but few have captivated my imagination to the extent of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. I’d never read anything similar. The book changed literary conventions and brought to life fascinating characters I could completely relate to and sympathize with.

However, much to the chagrin of many of her fans, Rice has abandoned her well-loved vampires and changed her literary style to fit her Christian agenda. Her latest work, Angel Time, is an example of the new theistic direction her endeavors are taking.

Originally, I had very high hopes for Angel Time but I was sorely disappointed. Instead of breaking away from literary traditions — like she did in Interview with the Vampire — Rice embraces them in her new novel. I expected the angelic characters in the novel to divert from the traditional depiction of angels in pop culture, in the same way Rice’s vampires are different from Dracula.

However, the angels in the novel are identical to the ones I’ve seen on television Christmas specials. Malchiah, one of the main characters, adopts this conventional behavior, approving and disapproving of other characters’ actions and providing them with moral guidance.

Toby, one of the other characters, is stale and unemotional. As sad as the story of his impoverished childhood with his alcoholic mother and his regression into gang life is, his tale seems cliché, and he is emotionally disconnected from it.

The overall plot of the story is just as dull and shallow as the characters. Angel Time suffers from too much detail about the characters’ histories and insufficient suspense and intensity. Rice also spends too much time telling the history of the Catholic Church.

The beginning of the novel glorifies the Catholic Church to the point that I felt pressured to convert to Catholicism, which annoyed me and made me feel uncomfortable. However, Rice also explains the historical wrongdoings of the Church in the later half of the novel by detailing the institutional persecution of the Jewish people, which improves the story by making it less biased. Regardless, I expected and hoped Rice would take a more progressive approach to Christianity in her new novel.

Though I was more optimistic than most Rice fans about the outcome of Angel Time and the new Christian direction her art is going, I finished the book with skepticism. The novel’s mediocrity gave me little hope that Anne Rice’s future theological pieces would be as great as her vampire novels. The pedestal I put her on has been lowered, and that is painful for me to see.