Stand back, all you other bloodsuckers, the Vampire Lestat is back. Before Twilight, before True Blood, before The Vampire Diaries or Underworld or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, author Anne Rice changed the way we think about vampires with her legendary series of novels collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles, starting in 1976 with the publication of Interview with the Vampire all the way through to 2003’s Blood Canticle, which at the time Rice swore would be the last book about vampires she would ever write. A few years before that, Rice had returned to the Catholic Church of her youth, and had decided to dedicate all her future writing to religious-themed novels (she wrote two historical novels about Jesus during this time, as well as two Angel themed novels). But in 2010, Anne Rice publicly quit Christianity (via Facebook) and slowly returned to the world of classic supernatural fiction with two werewolf novels, The Wolf Gift and The Wolves of Midwinter. Fans started to wonder if a return to the world of the undead was imminent.

Last night on The Dinner Party Show, a podcast hosted by Anne’s son, novelist Christopher Rice, and Eric Shaw Quinn, Anne Rice revealed that her vampires were indeed returning after eleven years in a new novel called Prince Lestat, which Rice says is a sequel to the first five installments in The Vampire Chronicles, but more specifically would be a sequel to the third book in the series The Queen of the Damned. According to Rice, this is a “big Vampire Chronicle about Lestat and the other vampires, and what they are doing right now. How they are coming to terms with everything that’s happened to them and how Lestat is dealing with the demand from all sides that he step forward and become some kind of leader of the tribe”

On the show she dropped a few not-too-spoilery tidbits, including that almost all the vampires from the early books would be returning, some old relationships might be rekindled (Lestat + Louis 4 EVA!) and that this book is merely novel #1 in an all-new incarnation of The Vampire Chronicles. Rice added that she has already signed a deal for a second book in this new series, which is (tentatively) titled Blood Paradise. She also talked about the possibility of movement on a big-screen adaptation of the fourth vampire novel, The Tale of the Body Thief, which would be combined in part with elements from the second novel The Vampire Lestat. She revealed a few more things hardcore fans might be interested in, so if you’re one of them, click on the above link and give the episode a listen.

Prince Lestat will come out on October 28th, 2014, just in time for Halloween. Pre-orders start Sunday, March 16th.