BLACKWOOD FARM CHAPTERS 49 & 50

I lost the book again. At first I wondered if I was doing this subconsciously, then I found it on the bookshelf. Someone must have put it there with the intent of helping me.

Alas, there's no help for...

BLACKWOOD FARM CHAPTERS 49 & 50

"I thirsted and I was alone."

Sounds like you need a booty call, Quinn!

Instead, he looks at the altar for tomorrow's ceremony and tells us how Clem got the firewood for it. Everyone has gone---in a limo, of course, it is noted---except Patsy. Tommy, by the way, pleaded to get to watch the exorcism. Not gonna lie, that's a kid after my own heart, I totally would have done that. Patsy, on the other hand, cursed at Quinn and called his scheme to get rid of Goblin "self-centered" according to Quinn.

Quinn sends Cindy the nurse away, telling Cindy that he will "take care of" Patsy.

He goes to Patsy's room. She calls him a "spoilt brat" and asks what he's doing there. He thinks how she looks like a child in her nightgown with her "beauty parlor blond" hair down. She tells him to get out and that she won't go no matter what he does, that she hates him and doesn't want his money.

"And from her mind came the pure stream of animosity and hatred and jealousy, the pure hate she had so keenly expressed."

Behind Patsy appears the filmy figure of the "hateful" and "vengeful" ghost of Rebecca. Quinn wonders why she "dared" to be there, wanting her to get away from him, whilst she requests again "A life for my life."

Then he picks up Patsy and snaps her neck, just like that. He specifically mentions he does not drink a drop of her blood. Then he takes her body out on the pirogue and dumps her in the deepest part of the swamp. No one sees him except "hateful, vengeful Rebecca" who is "exultant" who says that she counts it as a "real fine vengeance". Quinn retorts "Get thee behind me Satan. I didn't do this for thee but for me."

I hope we're not supposed to see that as okay. Patsy was vile and abusive to Quinn, yes, but she was also helpless and dying and no threat to him now. He just needed her out of the house was all. There are definitely a lot of times I can get behind a victim killing their abuser. This is one of the few times I can't.

Also, for all that Quinn stresses to us that no one but Rebecca saw, I should think it would be PRETTY DAMN OBVIOUS to Cindy, and probably everyone else. I'm betting that, if Rice ever even actually thinks of that, she'll probably claim they just don't care because no one liked Patsy and everyone loves Quinn.

Rebecca, appeased regardless of Quinn's intent, disappears, presumably never to return. So that plot is done, I guess.

The gators move in to eat up Patsy.

Quinn goes back alone the cemetary. Hours pass. He thinks how he is "Quinn the killer" of both the bride and his own mother. Both women who Rice was sure to paint as unpleasant skanks, I should note, as she did with Rebecca. I think she deliberately makes them such that Quinn can reasonably feel guilty about it without the reader finding it absurd---Patsy was pathetic and neglected, Rebecca was brutally murdered, the bride wasn't a murderer like everyone else at her wedding---but can't bear them to be victims that she, the writer, actually feels for at all. They're all very much the same kind of "bad woman" ---as are the coded-Latina women in the beginning of the book that Quinn kills too, if I recall right---enough that it gives me the impression that, like LKH, Rice seems to think that being a "slut" is worse than murdering one.

Quinn thinks how he's all alone on Blackwood Farm for the first time in his life.

He is still thirsty, but does not feel he has the stamina to hunt. But he also doesn't think he can do it tomorrow night, given what they have planned. He worries a bit about this poor planning, but it's okay because Lestat shows up and lets Quinn drink from him till Quinn tastes "his pure heart, his heart for me, his heart and nothing more could ever be wanted, nothing evermore."

Bwaugh. Man, we have gotten a LONG way from original Lestat for someone to taste his heart and call it pure.

Come to think of it---Quinn is a rich young man from a plantation, is he maybe meant to be a sort of Louis do-over with Lestat? Like Rice decided she didn't want them to have an abusive and tragic but very interesting story together after all because it ended with them NOT IN WUV so she decided to go with the fanfic version? That idea didn't hit me til now, but given the similarities I wonder.

Anyway, Chapter Fifty starts with the next sunset. Clem has piled the firewood and coals high around the tomb as instructed. Merrick is there, wearing her hair free and a black cotton dress with long sleeves and a full skirt and jet beads at her neck, with a big bag covered in glittering beadwork. My Goth-admiring self is jealous. Lestat's there too with his hand on the small of Quinn's back.

Merrick lights all the candles. She then pours kerosene over all the fuel and sets it ablaze. Geez guys, why is she doing all the work? Just as I think this, she tells them to come here and be her helpers. Good. She tells them anything they have believed in the past is not important, that they must "believe with me now" and put their faith in this exorcism. She asks Quinn to tell her the "true names" as far he knows of Garwain's parents and all his ancestors. Quinn does so, then she says to remember her instructions and takes a big gold knife from her bag. She cuts her wrist, Lestat pulls her back from the fire, she cuts again and dribbles the blood into a chalice she takes from her bag. "The heat of the fire was dreadful now and I hated it" with both the "instinct" of a human and of a "Blood Hunter."

Merrick throws back her head, lifts her arms up, and cries out to "Lord God, Who made all things seen and unseen" to bring Garwain to her so that she may guide him to God, for he is "lost to your Wisdom and your Protection" She asks Lestat and Quinn to join her prayer, which they do.

Goblin does indeed come, in a huge gust of wind with red eyes. He says he knows the tricks of a witch, that Merrick hates him and means to kill him. His figure begins to "fill out and grow immense" and bear down upon Merrick. She yells "Burn, now, burn!" and all of them send all their power at Goblin while yelling this, and he rises up above the flames, made of tiny flames himself, "paralyzed" and "retracting" and "howling" and "turning in on himself and coiling" and he becomes a wind on the altar that bears down as a funnel on Merrick. Merrick staggers backwards, but then keep up the force and the commands of "burn!" and Merrick adds "Burn till all of you is pure ghost as it should be! And you can pass into the Light as God wills, Garwain!"

Merrick then pulls from her bag the tiny shriveled corpse of the baby Garwain, and shouts to Goblin (in much prettier, more extensive prose) that this is his body. Goblin proclaims her a liar and tries to snatch the baby corpse. Merrick won't let go and continues to tell Goblin to go to God, while asking God to take him. Quinn can see that Goblin is trying to fuse with Merrick, but she is resisting with all her power. Quinn cries out,

"Dear God, who made Julien, Gravier, Patsy, take him, take this orphan! Grace, Alice, Rose, come for this doomed wandered. Add your prayers to ours."

Quinn, you have a DAMN lot of nerve to invoke Patsy for this! You literally JUST killed her and fed her to gators!

They yell some more praying, and Merrick lifts the dead baby up. It begins to come to life, moving its limbs and crying. But I guess Goblin still has not returned to it, because Merrick starts commanding him to do so.

"High above the fire, the giant image of Goblin shivered, horrific and weak and confused, and then plunged, plunged into the crying infant."

Quinn thinks "Amen, brother, amen."

I admit, as preachy and annoying as all the praying is, this would be a cool movie scene in my opinion.

The fire is brilliant, yet does not hurt Quinn's eyes. An invisible force knocks him back. Merrick, child in arms, has climbed into the pyre. They are both burning, but in a "pure celestial Light" in which Quinn sees Pops, a toddling infant, Merrick, and a small old woman. Merrick turns and says farewell.

Quin is "transfixed by the Light" and its"immensity and undeniable sense of love" and "then slowly the great wealth of blessed Light faded."

I don't think it's my atheist bias talking when I say I dislike the factual surety of the divine in this series. Not just that the divine exists, but that it is objectively good, loves you, and everyone you love is waiting for you in a happy afterlife. These are all very comforting things, and assuage the deepest fears that many people have. Indeed, it's these fears that vampires are often used to represent---the question of life after death, the condition of the soul, the perverse horror of getting to see a dead relative again but in a horrible way.

I'm not saying that a divine presence, and a very Christian interpretation at that, is out of place in a vampire novel. That would be pretty absurd, for obvious reasons---both folklore and iconic vampire media (most notably Dracula) are full of stories in which Christian iconography and prayer is an effective weapon against these beings. It's simply the way that Rice handles it that I just find...kinda twee? I actually find faith a very beautiful thing in many ways despite not sharing it, but these characters don't have faith, they have proof that God (or something like Him) exists and is on their side to help them out and it all works out in the end after death. Lestat, especially, has personal experience---recall, he's literally drunk the blood of Christ. Vampires aren't just immune to holy relics in this series, they're in good with God!

And I don't have an inherent problem with that in itself either. I think you could do something cool with that, even. Like, I've always wanted to see a werewolf story that drew on the "Hounds of God"---the claim by a man who was accused of lycanthropy that, yes, he was a werewolf, but that werewolves serve God to fight other, evil supernaturals. I've only ever seen that used once, in The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.

My main problem is, I think, that from what I remember, wasn't "Interview" a lot about existentialism and how vampires don't really know where they come from or what they are and how they work, they just know that they exist. And I think it's fine that Rice expanded that lore so much in subsequent books---I think she was actually the first writer to introduce an origin for vampires as a species, as well as a "first vampire" character in Akasha, and that's really cool!--but when it gets to the really big questions like this, that were such a theme (I think?) in the first book....

I dunno. Maybe it is just my atheist bias. I guess I just find this very certain, very feelgood portrayal of divinity as out of place in what used to be a series of mystery and horror and, in the first book, unhappy endings. Maybe I'm just too much a cynic though? I do believe that a sense of hope can improve a horror story depending how it's used, but there's a difference between hope and certainty. And this is the latter.

Anyway, a sobbing Lestat pulls Merrick's body from the flames, trying to beat the fire out with his coat. I'm surprised there's a body at all, Ricean vampires are noted as very flammable, like I think they have flammable blood if I recall right?

Quinn tells Lestat she's gone, Lestat slashes his wrist to try to revive her with his blood. It doesn't work, Quinn repeats that she is gone, that he saw her say farewell in the Light.

"He wouldn't stop crying. I loved him."

They put her body back on the altar and finish burning her.

Lestat finishes the chapter by saying it is always the young ones who kill themselves: "The ones for whom mortality holds magic. As we grow older it's eternity that is our boon."

Next update---THE LAST CHAPTER!