-exploring the darkness, 1/?-
Did that scene ever happen? Was that another one of Armand’s lies? It doesn’t matter. I wanted to explore the classical motive of David with Goliath’s head, here inevitably twisted, losing its victorious aspect, leaving only the figure of a young boy, holding a severed head.
I hope to God that this story was just something that Armand made up; somehow trying to intimidate the others, displaying the cruelty he could be capable of. This whole section though had me enthralled, the middle section of TVA was some of Rice’s best writing in my opinion, and the image of this–the Botticelli cherub, dressed in dusty and outdated but once opulent 18th century clothing, beneath the Paris streets, the stench of rot, old graves, and the filth of the city permeating through the earth, in a dark room lit by greasy tapers of tallow candles, hacking apart the body of this thing, this abomination as he sees her, this obstacle to his newest fascination, that of Louis, and he will demolish her, just as the hands were removed from the violinist in a mad attempt to reach Lestat again, this devil with an angel’s face capable of Lucifer’s cruelty–its a world of obscenity for its beauty, sublime in its composition of a clash of ideals, and shows like two unlikely titans of evil within the series as the most innocent in the face.
As always, perfectly captured by the wonderful @sheepskeleton
“I tried to grant her fondest wish, that she should have the body of a woman,
a fit shape for the tragic dimension of her soul.
…Enough. I won’t relive it.
I will not.
I never loved her. I didn’t know how.”
– The Vampire Armand