Servant of the Bones was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1996. The novel stands apart from both the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair Witches series, though it shares Rice’s characteristic concerns: immortality, theological questioning, the relationship between power and morality, and the sensual texture of historical settings rendered in elaborate detail.
Azriel is a Jewish youth in ancient Babylon during the reign of Cyrus the Great. Through a ritual involving the creation of golden bones — a process that draws on golem mythology, Babylonian necromancy, and Rice’s own inventions — Azriel’s spirit is bound to the bones, creating a being that can be summoned by whoever possesses them. He becomes the “Servant of the Bones”: a powerful spirit enslaved to a succession of masters across three thousand years.
The novel moves between Azriel’s historical memories (Babylon, Jerusalem, medieval Europe, the Black Death) and a contemporary New York plotline in which a charismatic televangelist and corporate mogul named Gregory Belkin is planning a mass poisoning. Rice uses Azriel’s millennia of experience to provide perspective on human cruelty and resilience: he has seen every form of persecution, every expression of religious fanaticism, and the contemporary threat is both uniquely modern and depressingly familiar. The novel’s engagement with Jewish history and mysticism — the destruction of the Temple, the diaspora, the tradition of the golem as protective spirit — is handled with a seriousness unusual for popular supernatural fiction.
Collecting Servant of the Bones
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20