Rice sharpens her gothic bite

In the first chapter of Anne Rice’s latest novel, 22-year-old Tarquin “Quinn” Blackwood, a newly made vampire, writes a revealing letter to the Vampire Lestat, who has banned other blood drinkers from New Orleans. Quinn needs help and seeks Lestat’s advice. The letter is revealing because Quinn knows where to leave it: at Lestat’s flat on the Rue Royale. Indeed, he knows a great deal about vampires. How? Because, like millions of us, he has read “The Vampire Chronicles,” which we assume are fictions by Rice but which he knows are true stories, many written by Lestat himself.

It’s a sign of how the vampire story has changed since Bram Stoker started the genre a century ago with “Dracula.” His vampire was a singular, foreign menace. Rice’s vampires, witches and ghosts are just another large, eccentric Southern family, at home with one another and separated from the rest of us by the thinnest of barriers.

Quinn’s own family is peculiar, to say the least. In the 1880s, Manfred Blackwood cleared a farm and built a mansion on the edge of Sugar Devil Swamp in northern Louisiana. Then he disappeared, allegedly with the blood of several women on his hands. Quinn explores the swamp and finds Manfred’s hideaway, with rusty chains, human bones and a mysterious gold-paneled tomb.

Even as a child, Quinn can see ghosts, and Blackwood Farm swarms with them. In particular, Quinn has a double, an ectoplasmic twin named Goblin, who follows him everywhere. Sometimes loving, sometimes mischievous, Goblin is as real to Quinn as his beloved Aunt Queen or any of the tutors or laborers on the property.

Having Goblin around makes it hard for Quinn to fit in with society outside the farm. A second supernatural relationship -- with Rebecca, the ghost of one of Manfred’s murdered mistresses -- lures him into the swamp and puts him within a vampire’s striking range.

Once the “Dark Trick” is worked on Quinn, his hopes of marriage to Mona Mayfair -- one of Rice’s Mayfair witches -- are destroyed. Worst of all, Goblin grows stronger, stealing some of the blood Quinn sucks from his victims, threatening to kill on his own..

Goblin has to be stopped, maybe even destroyed. And only Lestat, with his centuries of experience in the realm of the undead, might know how to do that. So Quinn -- who has never taken the easy way out -- bravely tracks Lestat down.

Quinn is the main reason “Blackwood Farm” is a livelier read than Rice’s last novel, “Blood and Gold.” As narrator, he brings a boyish charm, even humor.

A Rice plot sprawls like kudzu, and there’s room in this one for 19th century Naples and a hermaphrodite gladiator from ancient Rome. Still, “Blackwood Farm” hews to the oral storytelling tradition of the South: people sitting on a porch, swapping yarns about their family -- the odder the family, the better.