Queen of Kings [Paperback]

I really enjoyed this book as it combined my love of Egyptian History and fantasy. A story of a couple's love for each other that not even death could part, a mother's undying love for her children and her vengeance on those that would harm those she loves.

After a spell goes wrong Cleopatra is possessed by the ancient goddess, Sekhmet the daughter of Ra and the goddess of destruction, her love and soul mate Mark Antony is dead, her first born son Caesarion murdered and her three children Cleopatra Selene, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus taken back to Rome and paraded like trophy's.

There are Egyptian and Roman gods, witches, ghosts and shape shifting, it made a pleasant change for the growing popular stories of vampires and werewolves. Cleopatra is far more than a blood drinking monster, she wants vengeance on the Roman Emperor Octavian whilst fighting an internal battle with the Sekhmet to keep her humanity and not give in to her blood lust.

My only criticism is that it could have done with more of a description of the surroundings etc in the story.

The enduring love story of Anthony and Cleopatra has been retold many times throughout history. In Queen of Kings, Headley has given this famous tale a darker and more mythological twist.

We join the lovers at the point in history when Octavian Caesar, great nephew of the late Julius, is camped outside the city of Alexandria. Octavian sends a false message to Cleopatra's beloved Anthony and he kills himself believing his queen has betrayed him. On discovering the deceit, Cleopatra is driven to making an impossible deal, and uses dark magic to summon one of the old gods, the goddess Sekhmet, and strikes a bargain - her soul for her husband's life. Sadly, through an unfortunate accident, the resurrected Anthony dies again. One could say, to lose your husband once is unfortunate; to lose him again is careless.

As is often the case when humans make deals with deities, the consequences of the bargain are never fully realised until it is too late. The last pharaoh of Egypt becomes a creature driven mad by anger and revenge.

Despite Cleopatra committing atrocities with her new powers, one can't help empathising with her. Desperate to keep her country out of the hands of Rome and distraught at the idea of a future without Anthony, the love of her life, you can understand why she made such a hasty bargain. Her anguish, and frustration, along with the lives she takes fuel the goddess's need for blood, while Cleopatra is left to suffer the emotional consequences.

The characters of Octavian and Agrippa, his general, are written extremely well. Agrippa's stoic scepticism of all things mythical only serves to highlight the increasing psychosis of his Emperor, Octavian as he unsuccessfully tries to combat magic with magic.

Headley's writing is extremely evocative. This is a period of history most people are somewhat familiar with, but it is one that we don't have a great deal of factual evidence about. This ambiguity has allowed the author just enough freedom to weave in antastical elements of mythology from many pantheons.

The 'V' word is never actually used, but early in the novel, Cleopatra is found dead with two puncture wounds in her neck. She then rises from the dead and maintains her after life by surviving on the blood of her victims. The reader could be forgiven in thinking this book is another run of the mill vampire novel. But it isn't.

The book falls squarely into what I would say is the increasingly popular Historical Fantasy genre. At times, it seemed in danger of slipping into Dark Romance territory, but it doesn't. Cleopatra's love for Anthony transcends death, but fortunately for us, nobody sparkles.

The narrative speaks of terrible times, a hell on earth; as the vengeful queen possessed by the goddess of death and destruction, rampages across Rome seeking retribution against her enemies. However, I was personally disappointed at the surprising lack of violence. It is often alluded to, or the reader comes in to the narrative to discover it is all over bar the shouting. I was hoping for something more visceral, but the book seems to not want to alienate a possible young female demographic with too much violence. I am surmising the reason for this, as it certainly isn't due to laziness on the author's part. The amount of detail given to describing Cleopatra's anguish for instance, or the increasing madness and paranoia of Octavian clearly displays excellent descriptive abilities.

I have to applaud Headley for her ability to seamlessly blend historical fact and mythology, it is immensely enjoyable and certainly the key selling point for the book. It raises Queen of Kings above the glut of the average vampire or 'dark romance' novel that seem to be filling our bookshops at the moment, as everyone tries to jump on the (bafflingly) successful Twilight band wagon.

Inevitably, this book will get compared to Queen of The Damned, and while it is true that if you are a fan of Anne Rice, you will love this; this is something with a little more class.

Queen Of Kings is published by Bantum Press and released 21st July

"Once, there was a queen of Egypt... a queen who became through magic something else." (p.219) The queen - the Queen of Kings - is Cleopatra, of course. Her from the history books. And the something else?

Why, it's funny you should ask. Cleopatra becomes... a vampire!

Well, sure she does. Don't tell me you were thinking she'd get her mummy on. Imagine: a cinnamon-scented corpse, swathed in toilet paper and slowly crisping. That's just not very sexy, now is it? And Maria Dahvana Headley's second novel after The Year of Yes is very sexy. It is also - and this last might surprise - superb. Spellbinding, even.

In its first phase, the events of Queen of Kings go much as records suggest. Around 30 years before Christ arrived to put a spanner in the works the world over, Cleopatra is ruler of an Egypt under siege by the mean old Romans, led by Octavian (later Augustus) Caesar himself. When she loses her beloved, Marc Antony, Cleopatra can bear life no longer, and commits ritual suicide, inducing an asp - or a cobra - to bite her breast... or somewhere else.

Here, needless to say, the historical accounts begin to differ. And here, too, is where Queen of Kings diverges from the facts, such as they are, of Cleopatra's rise and subsequent fall, for in Headley's novel - apparently the first in an epoch-spanning saga - the queen of Egypt does not die at all. Instead, tormented by the loss of her one true love, or else - depending on who you ask - "broken by her hunger for power, and by her desire to be the queen of more than her own country," (p.241) she summons the goddess Sekhmet, who rises from Hades to inhabit her.

What follows, as Cleopatra comes to terms with an unspeakable lust for blood, and the state of her soul if soul she still has, is a supremely satisfying hybrid of historical fiction and dark, deeply sensual fantasy sure to seduce all comers this Summer. Possessed of a hunger for vengeance only inflamed by the insatiable wrath of the warrior goddess in her heart, Cleopatra is become a "tear in the tapestry of the fates" (p.293) which in Octavian's pitiful wake rends a bloody swathe across Egypt, then through Rome, and thereafter... the world.

"With every move, she lacerated skin and wounded innocent victims, without conscience, without care. Nowhere in the stories, nowhere in the histories, was there anything comparable." (p.272)

Well, perhaps not in the stories of Cleopatra's era, or the histories, but in ours, there are comparable narratives to that set out in Queen of Kings, and no shortage thereof; see the hot vampire heroine of any one of a vast selection of contemporary paranormal romances seducing her way to victory or vengeance.

However, Headley's novel is not so straightforward, nor so single-minded. For one thing, the reader is not always in Cleopatra's pocket as Queen of Kings powers on, ever onward: though she is certainly the star of the show - her perspective is paramount - from the outset we also watch the legendary Egyptian from eyes other than her own. We are with Antony when Octavian sends a false messenger to cheat the Roman's fate, and with the weaksauce Caesar when he discovers, to his horror, her tomb empty and despoiled. When a terrible Cleopatra comes a-calling to collect on Octavian's mortal debt, our point of view is with him and the three witches he has enlisted in his defence, as much or more than it is with the resurrected queen.

Some advance reviews have criticised Queen of Kings for its variety of perspectives. I would counter that without them - if Headley had us spend the whole novel in Cleopatra's company - there would be no moral ambiguity to her, no mystery, as there is: only wickedness. Without Octavian and Antony, the queen's daughter Seline and the scholar Nicolaus, we would know Cleopatra, when in practice her unknowableness is among her most effective character traits.

So too does the author treat Cleopatra's curse with more delicacy than I'd anticipated. Her affliction is rather more complex than simply: she's a sexy vampire, so there. Instead, she is a creature "dead and yet not dead," (p.103) violated by her own hand and robbed of children she never cared much for in the first place. Though I'm afraid she does, in what is surely Queen of Kings' weakest section, go through the usual vampire rigmarole, wherein "She must learn what she was. She must understand how to control [her power]. She could not afford to surrender completely, to lose herself in the hunger and fury." (p.128) That done - or not; I ain't saying - Queen of Kings pounces on towards its denouement, and I for one was with it all the way to the bitter end.

There are moments in Queen of Kings where it seems situations are complicated for the sake of complicating situations, and a few broad strokes where the characterisation does suffer, but this is fantasy with a swish of alt. history, and as such, it astonishes. As one of the witches - Chrysate - admits, "beauty was a tremendous part of her currency," (p.310) and much the same could and should be said for Maria Dahvana Headley's genre debut. It is well structured, wonderfully judged and lavishly crafted.

Queen of Kings is, in short, a much better and more beautiful book than perhaps it sounds. Read it. Weep, even.