Anne Rice is set to reveal her vision of the lost realm of Atlantis in a new novel starring her most famous creation, the vampire Lestat.

The bestselling American author has announced that Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis will be published on 29 November this year. It is Rice’s second novel about the vampire prince in two years: Prince Lestat was published in 2014, following a break of more than 10 years from the world of vampires.

“I’ve been dying to get my vision of Atlantis into the public realm for years. And believe me, there is a full-blown vision of Atlantis in this novel,” Rice told fans on Facebook. “I’ve been obsessed with it for years. Years. [I] have a huge library on Atlantis in fiction, in channelling, in history, in mythology … the whole thing. This was one of my greatest personal adventures, this novel. I’m delirious that it will be in bookstores by Christmas.”

According to the book’s description, the story will see Lestat, made famous in Rice’s novel Interview With the Vampire, “battling ... a strange otherworldly form that has somehow taken possession of [his] undead body and soul”. The spirit reveals the “hypnotic tale of a great sea power of ancient times; a mysterious heaven on earth situated on a boundless continent – and of how and why, and in what manner and with what far-reaching purpose, this force came to build and rule the great legendary empire of centuries ago that thrived in the Atlantic Ocean”.

“In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands. I saw flames that outshone the lamps of heaven. And all the world was shaken,” writes Rice in the book.

The novelist published Interview With the Vampire, later adapted for a film starring Tom Cruise, in 1976. Before 2014’s Prince Lestat, her most recent foray into the world of vampires was in 2003’s Blood Canticle. When she returned to the story of Lestat in 2014, she said she had gone back and reread all her Vampire Chronicles stories, and had to “wrestle Lestat to the ground, and beat him up, and say ‘look, you’ve got to talk to me, I’ve got to know what you’ve been doing’”.