Merrick - 1st Edition/1st Printing

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Fine in Fine dust jacket. 2000. First Edition; First Printing. 1/4 Cloth. 0679454489 . A very nice copy of the first trade edition (a limited signed edition was issued earlier by the Franklin Library) with book and dust jacket in Fine condition, SIGNED directly onto the title page by the author Anne Rice; Just when you thought it was safe for a bloodsucker to go out in the dark in New Orleans, along comes Merrick Mayfair, a sultry, hard-drinking octoroon beauty whose voodoo can turn the toughest vampire into a marionette dancing to her merry, scary tune. In Merrick, Anne Rice brings back three of her most wildly popular characters--the vampires Lestat and Louis and the dead vampire child Claudia--and introduces them to the world of her Mayfair Witches book series. It is Louis who brings about the collision of the fang and voodoo universes. Louis made Claudia a vampire in Rice's classic Interview with the Vampire, in which she was destroyed, and now he's obsessed with raising her ghost to make amends and seek guidance from the beyond. (Claudia physically resembles Rice's young daughter who died of a blood-related illness. Rice nearly died of a diabetic coma in 1998, and writing Merrick turned her excruciating recovery into an exhilarating burst of creativity); 8vo; [x], 307, [3] pages; Signed by Author .