Memnoch the Devil

Memnoch the Devil was published in 1995 as the fifth novel in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, following The Tale of the Body Thief. Rice's series had been moving steadily away from gothic horror and towards a cosmology of her own, and this book is the point at which the theology that had been in the background becomes the plot. It is the volume readers most often describe as the one that divides the series.

The title and several of the themes are borrowed from the nineteenth-century gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer by the Irish writer Charles Maturin, and Rice takes both the name and the argument from it: a figure who has bargained away his own rest and who has a case to make about the administration of the universe. Her Memnoch is not a tempter in the folkloric sense. He is a bureaucrat with a grievance and an account of creation, and Lestat's role in the book is to be shown things and to argue with them, which leaves him unusually passive for a character who normally drives his own stories.

The novel sold on the strength of the series and provoked a reaction from some of Rice's readers, who found the theological material in it uncomfortable. Rice wrote two more Lestat novels in the 1990s and continued the Chronicles into the following decade, and the television adaptation of the series, which began in 2022, has reached this material in its later seasons.

What the book is finally about is memory and mercy: the Devil's account of himself is an argument about who has been keeping the record, and Lestat is asked to decide whether to believe it.