Blackwood Farm

Deep in the Louisiana bayou, a young vampire named Quinn Blackwood carries a burden more dangerous than his newfound bloodlust: a spectral companion called Goblin, a spirit of uncanny intelligence that has shadowed him since childhood and grown hungrier with every passing year. When Quinn seeks out Lestat himself, desperate for answers and salvation, what unfolds is a story that cuts beneath the gothic surface to something rawer — the weight of a cursed family legacy, the seduction of being truly known by another, and the terrifying question of what we owe the ghosts we create.

Rice structures the novel as a story-within-a-story, with Quinn's confession unwinding in long, lush waves that showcase her signature gift for immersive Southern atmosphere — the heat and rot of the swamps, the grandeur of a crumbling plantation, the particular melancholy of beauty in decay. The prose is unapologetically rich and the pacing deliberately unhurried, rewarding readers who surrender to its rhythms. Lestat's presence gives the book a crackling tension between mentor and myth, while the Blackwood family history offers the kind of dense, generations-deep drama that makes Rice's fictional universe feel genuinely inhabited.