Merrick

Merrick is a vampire novel by the American writer Anne Rice and the seventh book in her Vampire Chronicles.

The novel brings together two of Rice's families: the vampires of the Chronicles and the witches of the Mayfair line. Louis asks David Talbot, a former scholar of the paranormal who is now a vampire himself, to help him reach the ghost of Claudia, and the two of them go to Merrick Mayfair, whose family has practised voodoo in New Orleans for generations. Merrick agrees, and the séance gives Louis what he asked for, though not on the terms he wanted. The book spends much of its length in the past, in Merrick's childhood, in the old woman who taught her, and in a journey to a Central American cave where a jade mask guarded by spirits was kept. Rice writes the two worlds as equally real, and the ending is about what a bargain with the dead costs both of the people who made it.

The novel is the one that joined the vampire and witch series together, and it is narrated by David, who is closer to the human world than most of the vampires are.