The Wolves of Midwinter is a Ghost Fiction novel by Anne Rice. Read summary below.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The tale of The Wolf Gift continues … It is winter at Nideck Point and for Reuben Golding, now infused with the Wolf Gift, this promises to be a season like no other.
Oak fires burn in the stately flickering hearths, and the community organizes its annual celebration of music and pageantry. Reuben is preparing to honor an ancient Midwinter festival with his fellow Morphenkinder—a secret gathering that takes place deep within the verdant recesses of the surrounding forests.
However, Reuben is soon distracted by a ghost. Tormented, imploring, and unable to speak, it haunts the halls of the great mansion, drawing him toward a strange netherworld of new spirits, or “ageless ones.” And as the swirl of Nideck’s preparations reaches a fever pitch, they reveal their own dark magical powers.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The Best of the Beasts
Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2013
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I won’t spoil anything for you here. It’s all unveiled masterfully in the novel’s own good time.
The Wolves of Midwinter is as sumptuous, as chilling, as engaging, as tender, as terrifying a book as you could hope to find in a hundred years. I enjoyed The Wolf Gift and one should read it first. This isn’t always the case with Rice’s books, some of which can be read entirely out of order without a tremendous loss of orientation to the reader. I recommend you read The Wolf Gift, both because it establishes relationships and a context that becomes important in The Wolves of Midwinter, but more importantly because there were promises made, it seems to me, in the first book that were not only fulfilled in the second, but Rice’s delivery surpassed her first book’s promises.
The Morphenkinder continue to grow in complexity throughout the book, and while more is steadily revealed their mystery consistently deepens. Even familiar characters harbor secrets often surprising and unguessed-at but always somehow rewarding, while new characters surface with suspicious and perhaps malicious motives. Even the servants appointed to assist the “Distinguished Gentlemen” of Nideck Point are more than they appear, curious and strange, yet fascinating despite their seemingly innocuous role.
Careful readers will notice old themes returning, themes notably from The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned (and many others)that ponder not only the nature of evil (and slaying the Evil Doer), but how should an immortal predator live ethically among (or away from) humanity? How close is too close? Is the Wolf Gift a curse to the innocent lives it touches? Can Reuben Golding, Rice’s hero, really have his circle of Morphenkinder and his mortal family in his life, or is the whole affair doomed to the same calamity that befell Marchent Nideck?
Speaking of Marchent, this is a ghost story, as well. A Christmas ghost story, which is best somehow, I feel. Reuben and Felix are haunted by the loss of their beloved Marchent, but the metaphor soon becomes much more. There are other spirits, other races that make this story a broader, more fleshed-out (so to speak) expansion of the world of the Morphenkinder. The manner in which Reuben makes these discoveries is fascinating to watch.
The Midwinter pageantry, the driving rain howling constantly at the windows, the glittering lights strung throughout the Nideck Forest, the sumptuous and beautiful Christmas Party held at Nideck Point for practically the entire County of Marin, the dark hallways beneath the house, all leap off the page with a vivid, dizzying intensity that Rice has perhaps never achieved so resoundingly, powerfully well.
There are also smaller, more intimate pieces of this book beyond Reuben’s romance with Laura. Reuben’s father Phil, his brother James the Priest, Felix and even Margon the Godless have real, meaningful time in this book, and while some may consider them ancillary characters, and their contributions to be side-plot, I have to say that they enrich the thrust, the hopeful message, the beautiful symmetry of the entire work.
There are, of course, challenges in this book as well. Rice often makes away with the sticky details of real life with little flourishes of some character or other saying “I’ve taken care of everything.” Her characters have, as ever, a stylized way of speaking that is not always realistic. There are, at times, tender, deeply romantic sentiments that some might consider a little too saccharine for their taste. And yes, some situations and setups come across as just a little too convenient and easily arrived at. In the interest of being a fair reviewer, I think all that is true. However, do you really care about the details of how someone gets permits from the county, how money is transferred, flights booked, or how a go-nowhere murder investigation is carried out? I don’t because I’m so interested in the story she’s telling, not the story she isn’t. I absolutely forgive all those little things because what’s happening in the story is otherwise so enthralling. A lesser writer wouldn’t be able to get away with as much, but Rice is truly on her game. I admit I had some trouble with the Christ novels, and Blood Canticle threw me a bit, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say this is one of the best and most mature and brilliant novels that Anne Rice has produced- and I think there’s more coming from Reuben and Company! Bottom line: Read The Wolf Gift if you haven’t already. Then read The Wolves of Midwinter. It is a hopeful and a beautiful vision, perhaps her most hopeful to date. This is every bit the equal of Rice’s very finest work.
Anne Rice Author Of The Wolves of Midwinter: The Wolf Gift Chronicles Book, She was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, which provided the backdrop for many of her famous novels. She was the author of more than 30 books, including her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, which was published in 1976. It has since gone on to become one of the best-selling novels of all time, and was adapted into a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst, and Antonio Banderas. In addition to The Vampire Chronicles, Anne was the author of several other best-selling supernatural series including Mayfair Witches, Queen of the Damned, the Wolf Gift, and Ramses the Damned. Under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, Anne was the author of the erotic (BDSM) fantasy series, The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. Under the pen name Anne Rampling she was the author of two erotic novels, Exit to Eden and Belinda. A groundbreaking artist whose work was widely beloved in popular culture, Anne had this to say of her work: “I have always written about outsiders, about outcasts, about those whom others tend to shun or persecute. And it does seem that I write a lot about their interaction with others like them and their struggle to find some community of their own. The supernatural novel is my favorite way of talking about my reality. I see vampires and witches and ghosts as metaphors for the outsider in each of us, the predator in each of us…the lonely one who must grapple day in and day out with cosmic uncertainty.”
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