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    Servant of the Bones
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    Servant of the Bones
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    Servant of the Bones
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Servant of the Bones

    Written by Anne Rice

    Narrated by Michael Cumpsty

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In a new and major novel, the creator of fantastic universes o vampires and witches takes us now into the world of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the destruction of Solomon's Temple, to tell the story of Azriel, Servant of the Bones.

    He is ghost, genii, demon, angel--pure spirit made visible. He pours his heart out to us as he journeys from an ancient Babylon of royal plottings and religious upheavals to Europe of the Black Death and on to the modern world. There he finds himself, amidst the towers of Manhattan, in confrontation with his own human origins and the dark forces that have sought to condemn him to a life of evil and destruction.


    From the Trade Paperback edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 4, 2000
    ISBN9780375418297
    Unavailable
    Servant of the Bones
    Author

    Anne Rice

    A.N. Roquelaure is the pseudonym for bestselling author Anne Rice, the author of 25 books. She lives in New Orleans.

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    Reviews for Servant of the Bones

    3.5/5

    719 ratings16 reviews

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    • 2/5
      A very slow read. Although the story could have been great, the book is in style closer to Memnoch or Body Thief. The framing story is pointless, half the book is just ramblings and the main character feels inconsistent. To compensate for the long stretches where nothing happens, the end is rushed and too short.Anne Rice has written many great books, but this is unfortunately not one of them.
    • 2/5
      Okay, so I finally finished it. I didn't like the narrator or the narration. I found Ms Rice's writing clumpy as if she'd tried a little too hard.Overall I was glad to get to the end. Shame.
    • 4/5
      As a bit of a diversion from the regular vampire lore, in The Servant of the Bones by Anne Rice we are taken to the hay days of a crowed chaotic Babylon. At times rambling on in non-essential dialogue this story is rich in detail and character development not to mention vivid descriptions of places and people long past. A very long time ago a young boy sacrifices himself for the Jewish community in Babylon under the impending rule of King Cyrus. His reward is to live forever on as a powerful spirit neither completely alive and certainly not dead. Passed on from master to master Azriel eventually ends up in modern day New York where he becomes a pivotal component in the plan of a mad mastermind set on bringing about his version of the End of Days.Before all that however we travel with Azriel and we see through his eyes the world as it once was. All this we are told by Azriel himself as he re-told it to Jonathan a writer who trapped himself for the winter in a remote lodge surrounded by miles of snow. The setup of an old tired spirit telling his life's story to a listener who has the power to write it all down appropriately is perhaps not a novel one, but it certainly works in this case. Although the story starts out very slowly with lots of re-starts, as Azriel puts in more and more detail, right around the middle of the novel things start to pick up and accelerate towards the ending.After thousands of years of being immortal and mostly omnipotent, Azriel is confronted with a situation he can't change. He can't prevent the death of a young girl, something we later read has many more personal repercussions for our 'hero' dead or alive. The more he tries the less he seems to have a grip on his physical world around him and he can't prevent those around him he cares about to not perish at the hands of baser minds. Or can he? We are treated here to a well thought out and well told story on humanity as experienced by a being far from human. At times dragging on and at times too fantastical for its context, this novel his highly entertaining and engrossing.
    • 5/5
      A great story, and a philosophical one at that. Ms Rice seems to be able to describe her (and mine) philosophy of life eloquently and succinctly. Plato, St. Thomas of Aquinas, could not have said it better than her character, Zurvan: "...If an activity is not grounded in 'to love' or 'to learn', then it does not have value..." In Azriel, we see the dichotomy of humanity, the hatred and the love, the desire to do good, and the desire to do evil...those forces each of us must fight within ourselves. All this is wrapped up in a tale that spans centuries, and you are left with a feeling and a desire "to love and to learn"...
    • 4/5
      Great story. She's great at weaving history into her stories.
    • 4/5
      Well crafted chiller as usual
    • 4/5
      Great story. She's great weaving history into her stories.
    • 4/5
      Odd. Nicely written, but a tad difficult to get into. As always, I enjoyed the imagery she presented, but felt the ending was not as nicely wrapped up as she usually aims for. The ending was rushed, and anticlimactic, but the story concept was fresh.
    • 4/5
      A good departure from Rice's vampire series. This is a smart history speckled tale. I like it!
    • 4/5
      He is a ghost, demon, angel - in love with the good, in thrall o the evil. He pours out his heart to us, telling his astonishing story when he finds himself - in our own time, in New York City - a dazed withness to the murder of a young girl called Esther and ineplicably obsessed by the desire to avenge her. He takes us back to his mortal youth in th magnigicent Babylone - the gateway to the pagan gods, a wonder of ziggurats, and ships at anchor from all nations. We see Azriel at twenty - A jew, educated, rich, Beatiful, fiercely devoted to his captive hebrew tribe, and dedicated to his prophets Jermiah and Isaiah. In this time of bloody wars and religious up-heavals, greedy king and cunning magicians who vie with rabbis for spiritual dominion, Azriel falls victim to a royal plot compounded by his devotion to his hebrew god - only to be plucked from death by evil priests and sorceresses and transformed into a Genii commanded to do their bidding. Challenging these forces of destruction, marshalling all his strenghth and wit to defeat them, Azriel embarks on his perilous journey through time - From Babylon's hanging gardens, to the europe of the Black Death to Manhatan in the 1990's - and ultimately to his crucial confrontation with the ambitious and charismatic multi-billionaire, the televangelst-terrorist Gregory Belkin, father of the mysteriously murderd Esther - And the twentieth century embodiment of all that Azriel has struggled against. As Azriel's quest approaches it's climatic Horror, he dares to use and to risk his supernatural powers in the hope of forestalling a world-threatening conspiracy, and redeenning, at last, what was denied to him so long ago: his own eternal human soul.
    • 4/5
      An amazing work, begining in Babylon during the Hebrew exile and ending in modern-day New York.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed the beginning. Great page turning, interesting, held my attention! But I was quite disappointed in the ending. Parts seemed to drag, etc. It also left me with unanswered questions that seemed to me to be the result of sloppy writing. Definately unsatisfying at the end, but because of the great beginning, I'd still give it 3 stars. I am feeling generous.
    • 3/5
      Not the first Anne Rice book I would have picked to read, but I had limited options. I liked the premise a lot--the idea of a human who became an immortal spirit and was coping (and not coping) with eternity--and I thoroughly enjoyed the sections set in the past. Once the story hit the present, though, it started to get bogged down. There were several agonizingly long conversations involving Gregory that just went on and on for pages without giving us much new information. For example, when he's with Azrail in his Temple of the mind, he spends about six or seven pages saying how much he wants to explain his grand plan...only to NOT do it. And I didn't get the sense from the text that the character was taunting, just that we never got around to it. Also felt that the divide between good and evil was a bit too obvious at the end, which made Azrail's sacrifice seem to count for less--it seemed like something almost anyone would have done in that situation, unlike his better-structured decision to sacrifice himself for the Jewish population of Babylon several thousand years earlier.

      My biggest beef, though, is the uneven presentation. For about the first third of the book, Azrail's telling his story to Jonathan in quotations--literally every paragraph has quotation markes, though Jonathan doesn't interject nearly enough to justify this decision. What editor failed to tell Rice that this set up was a bad idea? And then we inexplicably lose the quote marks partway through. Azrail still addresses Jonathan from time to time, so why didn't a copyeditor point out that the book should be made internally consistent?

      The uneven presentation applies to the narrative as well. It's a big deal that Azrail can't remember his past--but that's the first part of his story that he tells Jonathan, so he then has to remind us in the rest of the story that he doesn't remember this or that. It makes for a confusing read--we know more than he does, but we're asked to sympathize with him not knowing. Frustrating! A good editor should have had a serious conversation with Rice about moving the big reveal to later in the story. Or just not bothering with it--after all, if the reader already knows Azrail's past, then there's really no reason, narratively speaking, for it to be a secret. There wasn't really a purpose to his being suspended in time--and I know that Rice could have done it, I definitely got that vibe from the quality of the writing that survived the lack of editorial intervention.

      A long read with good foundations, but I'm not going to rush out and insist that everyone read this book.
    • 2/5
      Some of her books seem to be all exposition and no action. This was one. Ask me the point of it. I couldn't tell you. I finished it a week ago and I couldn't tell you how it ended. Meh.
    • 3/5
      This is a quick read with the usual elements of a Rice novel: a character who could be considered evil at first comes to tell his story to the unsuspecting narrator.

      This particular story covers the servant of the bones. A man who was sacrificed becomes cursed to serve whoever has his bones. He kills, steals and does whatever his master requires of him. That is until he wakes up from his slumber without being called--with his new powers he fights to stop the man claiming to be his master from creating the apocalypse.
    • 4/5
      Great stand alone book. This book will keep you hooked from the beginning from to end