I can't really say that I read Anne Rice's new book, Violin. I did finish the work, but it was an experience much different than I usually have while reading a work of mainstream fiction. The language was ghostly and ethereal, as if the words I was reading were not something found on the printed page but rather heard somewhere in a dream. But since I risk sounding a bit spooky myself, perhaps I should explain what it is that I mean.

For quite a while now, the release of a new Anne Rice book has led to both apprehension and timid sort of hope on my part. I was frightened not by the Gothic nature of her work, but rather by how each book in a series seems to inevitably decline in quality. Having fallen in love with both Interview with the Vampire and The Witching Hour, I was then doomed to disappointment as each sequel tried and failed to be as good as the preceding books. It was almost like making friends with a fascinating person and then finding out after a few weeks that they are not distinctive at all.

Violin, however, is not a breeze but a gust of fresh air, shattering my fears of repetition and giving the reader something that is fresh and original and at times downright creepy. In this book the lines between the world of spirits and the world of human beings is deliciously blurred as Rice offers her readers a heroine who is so in love with death that she almost ceases to be alive by sheer force of will. Having watched many of the people she held dear die by slow inches (succumbing to alcoholism, cancer, and AIDS), Triana spends a substantial amount of time contemplating the grave and her loved ones who are already there.

It is in this state of half-mourning, half-fantasy that she first hears the strains of a violin played by a master outside her home. Having always had a love for the instrument but lacking the talent to achieve greatness in her own playing, she is drawn to him and fascinated by the images his playing conjures in her mind. It seems that this being is not alive in the traditional sense of the word, but lived during the time of Beethoven and has dwelt in a ghostly state for hundreds of years. His violin, too, is a spirit like himself, loved so much by the ghost that it was taken into death with him.

This creature uses his instrument to prey on the images in the minds of living beings and then somehow uses those emotions to create music that so strongly affects the listener that it drives them to extremes of emotion and occasionally to the brink of madness. His music is composed not so much of notes as it is of hopes and fears and dreams.

The entire book is beautifully vague, the words seemingly imitating the strains of music that no printed word can ever adequately describe. It is a work impossible to describe in a simple, formulaic "and then character A did this which caused character B to react this way." Instead, both corporeal and ghostly beings in the book operate on a realm that is so much removed from the everyday business of living that it is something rare and unusual. It eventually comes down to a struggle between the living and the dead, with the violin at the center of the conflict.

In Violin, Anne Rice has written something very delicate and original and I fear any attempt to describe further would clumsily damage the lovely work that she created. It is enough to note that she has worked some magic once again, and this time the spell she casts ensnares her reader as well as her characters.