Pandora was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1998 as the first of Rice’s “New Tales of the Vampires” — shorter novels that expand the Vampire Chronicles through the voices of secondary characters. Pandora, who had appeared briefly in earlier Chronicles novels as Marius’s companion and as a remote, melancholy figure glimpsed across centuries, finally tells her own story.
Born Lydia in Rome during the reign of Augustus, she was the daughter of a senator — educated, wealthy, and possessed of a sharp intelligence that Roman society had no use for in a woman. When her family is destroyed in a political purge, she flees to Antioch, where she encounters Marius, the ancient vampire who is guardian of Akasha and Enkil. Their love affair — conducted against the backdrop of the Roman Empire at its height — leads to her transformation.
Pandora’s voice is distinctive within the Chronicles: more restrained than Lestat’s flamboyance, more worldly than Louis’s anguish, more sophisticated than Armand’s adolescent intensity. She writes as a woman who has had two thousand years to reflect on the relationship between love and power, between male authority and female intelligence, between Roman civilization and the supernatural world that exists beneath it. Rice’s evocation of the Roman world — its architecture, its religious practices, its daily life — is characteristically detailed, and Pandora’s perspective on this world is that of an insider who has outlived everything she once knew.
Collecting Pandora
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$15