Vampire Tans! News at 11 : THE TALE OF THE BODY THIEF, <i> By Anne Rice (Knopf: $24; 428 pp.)</i>

Anne Rice’s elegant smoothie, the Vampire Lestat, is back, and up to all his old immortal tricks. He’s the same charmer, dressing in black velvet, meandering through museums to admire the Rembrandts, restoring a lovely crumbling mansion in New Orleans (that he himself lived in 100 years before). He’s the same inveterate, starry-eyed tourist, zooming from London to Paris to Miami to New Orleans to South American jungles to Caribbean resorts, still absolutely gaga over each and every new excursion.

What a refined vampire! How given to nostalgia; his memories of the filthy 18th-Century French castle he grew up in, his recurring visions of little Claudia, the orphan he rescued from a plague-infested hovel and played the “Dark Trick” on, turning her into an immortal, quintessential, ungrateful child, trying, as she did, to do away with him, but failing--of course. It’s possible, in theory, to kill a vampire, but the vampire Lestat ? Get serious.

For as Lestat himself announces, “No one outshines this figure you see before you--no one! . . . I am not time’s fool, nor a god hardened by the millennia; I am not the trickster in the black cape, nor the sorrowful wanderer. I have a conscience. I know right from wrong. I know what I do, and yes, I do it. I am the Vampire Lestat. That’s your answer. Do with it what you will.”

Lestat, this vampire of fine feeling, occupies himself at the novel’s opening as a kind of transfusion social worker: He scours city streets for serial killers and destroys them by charitably draining them of their blood. (Every once in a while he gets carried away and kills their intended victims too.) But Lestat is lonely and bored, distressed, sick of his vampiric life. He decides to do away with himself and flies as high as he can above the Gobi Desert, waiting at the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere for the blinding, destructive sun to come up.

This should kill him, but it doesn’t. A couple of days of this strenuous and painful suicide attempt leaves him with nothing more than a very bad sunburn that mellows to a becoming tan.

The trouble is, what’s the point of living--as a human or a vampire--if there’s no meaning to existence? As Lestat insists repeatedly, he’s “the miracle” without “the revelation.” He knows there are spirits aplenty shuffling and bumping along through the air, but he can’t get at the stuff behind it. He can’t make himself believe in God; he certainly can’t believe in the Devil.

But during these past years Lestat has made friends with an erudite and compassionate mortal, David Talbot, the head of a secret metaphysical society that keeps track of spirits, vampires and all manner of occult lore. David is getting just a little bit old--he’s 74 now, and every time Lestat sees his friend, he can’t help but get anxious about him. With preternatural hearing, Lestat can hear David’s heart speeding up and getting weaker. Repeatedly, Lestat asks David to come on over! Take a ticket for the Dark Trick, get a vampire transfusion, and live on the Dark Side, forever. David, facing human death, steadfastly refuses.

David, unlike his immortal friend, believes in God and in the Devil, because he heard them chatting once in a Paris cafe. From these overheard fragments (spoken in an unknown but understandable language), David was able to intuit that God is far from perfect and still in the process of exploration (how like Gregg Easterbrook’s hypothesis in his novel “This Magic Moment”), and that the Devil is smart enough by now to be fed up with his own thankless job.

Why David didn’t stroll over to the table right then and ask those Big Guys what they were up to is not adequately explained here, but it remains a beguiling subtext for the “real” plot of this book, which is this: Lestat is tempted by a low-life “body thief” who offers him the chance to switch bodies for a couple of days--so that Lestat will have the chance of being human again for at least a while. Lestat takes this scoundrel up on his offer. The scoundrel promptly disappears, leaving Lestat with a body--bad cold and all--and “the abysmal struggle and trivia and fear” of being human.

There’s a lot of fun to all this: good sex, great food, sunshine seen a hundred ways, and even a cruise on the QEII--a perfect place for a vampire, incidentally, since all the elderly passengers are one step away from death anyway and serve as perfect snack food for ravenous blood drinkers.

No one seems to have as much fun as Anne Rice as she takes us through these crazy fictional settings. She notices everything--the heavy silver coffee pots you find in first-class hotels, the buttery grits from fine Southern restaurants, exotic plants in unexplored jungles, and of course, blood, described in 132 possible ways. People love these books, and not, I think, for only this delicious sensuality. Reading Anne Rice is like sneaking by the back door into God’s mansion. There He is, chatting with the Devil. Is that how It works, then? For many people of education, “God,” “Religion,” “good-and-evil” are subjects far more forbidden and iffy than sex. You can’t talk about these things! Anne Rice opens the door to all that, suavely and charmingly. Beyond the blood, the food, the sex, and beignets , you can glimpse the Divine.