Novel: Servant of the Bones

Overview
Anne Rice's Servant of the Bones follows Azriel, a powerful spirit bound to animate human bones, as he recounts a life that stretches from ancient Mesopotamia into modern New York. Born of ritual and compelled into service, Azriel is neither fully living nor wholly dead; his existence is an uncanny blend of agency and bondage that propels him across millennia. The novel weaves historical evocation with urban gothic, asking how a supernatural being perceives morality, responsibility, and the human craving for meaning.
Azriel narrates his own story with a mixture of wonder, anger, and yearning. His voice carries the dust of ancient temples and the neon glare of contemporary streets, and Rice uses that voice to meditate on faith, free will, and the unseen forces that shape human destinies.

Plot
The tale begins in antiquity, where Azriel is called into being through an arcane ritual and bound to a set of bones. Initially a tool of priests and sorcerers, he serves as an instrument of power, executing missions beyond mortal reach. Over centuries he moves through cultures and epochs, observing human triumphs and cruelties, gradually cultivating a self that questions the terms of its servitude.
When Azriel awakens in the modern world, he finds himself drawn into contemporary lives and conflicts. He becomes entangled with people who seek his help and others who would exploit his powers. As he attempts to protect the innocent and right long-accumulated wrongs, he confronts moral dilemmas that force him to examine whether his actions are compelled by his nature or chosen by his will. The narrative builds toward a moral confrontation in which Azriel must decide what kind of being he will be: an instrument of vengeance, an agent of compassion, or something beyond the binaries that have defined him.

Themes
Servant of the Bones is largely a meditation on free will and redemption. Azriel's condition, tied to bones, able to animate and influence the living yet constrained by ancient bindings, serves as a powerful metaphor for the struggle to claim agency. Rice probes whether redemption is granted from without or forged through deliberate choice, and whether a being outside humanity can participate in the moral economy of forgiveness and responsibility.
Unseen influences, both spiritual and social, pervade the novel. Rice explores how hidden forces, religious fervor, superstition, political power, and personal obsession, shape lives across centuries, suggesting that history is a palimpsest of repeated human patterns. Loneliness and the search for belonging recur as Azriel moves between eras and peoples, always adjoining human intimacy from the margins.

Character and Voice
Azriel is an arresting narrator: ancient yet intimately observant, capable of lyrical reflection and stark, sometimes ruthless, honesty. Rice gives him a tone that blends epic distance with human vulnerability, a voice that can describe ritual accoutrements in one breath and mourn a simple human loss in the next. His interiority is the novel's engine, turning cosmic questions into palpable, emotional stakes.
Supporting figures are refracted through Azriel's perceptions rather than fully autonomous dramatis personae; they serve to illuminate aspects of his conscience and to challenge his assumptions. Rice's portrait of Azriel is less about external action than about inner transformation, and the novel's power lies in the slow accrual of moral insight he attains.

Style and Reception
Rice brings her characteristic sensual, descriptive prose to a metaphysical story, blending antique atmosphere with modern grit. The book's strengths are its evocative settings, philosophical ambition, and the haunting presence of its narrator. Some readers praise its profound questions and emotional intensity, while others find the pacing uneven and the plot subservient to meditation. For readers drawn to spiritual speculation wrapped in gothic, historical, and urban textures, Servant of the Bones offers a contemplative and memorable journey.