Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
The time is now.
We are in a small room with the vampire, face-to-face, as he speaks – as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first 200 years as one of the living dead…
He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently…carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir – young, romantic, cultivated – to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the “endless”, life…learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings…to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: The detachment, the hardened will, the “superior” sensual pleasures.
He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him…
We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire – all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child – and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: Delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court…night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death – a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below…
We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be…
We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining…to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires – the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within…to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled…
In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order.
I read this book back in the early 1990s, when I was in 8th or 9th grade.
I was SPELLBOUND by the way Anne Rice writes.
My teenage self was just swept away into the sensual and intellectually emotional world she creates in these pages…I was just TAKEN with the way she developed the vampiric characters of tortured Louie, arrogant Lestat, and forever a child Claudia.
I grew up close to New Orleans–right across Lake Ponchatrain–and I LOVED that I was so familiar with so much of the setting.
I KNEW the streets she spoke of…I KNEW the culture, the people, the magic, the mystery, the FEELING of the city.
If there was any city in the world where you could believe vampires walked and lived, New Orleans is MOST DEFINITELY it.
I was captivated in the very best way a book can captivate you.
Teenage me was PUMPED when this book became a movie in 1994. I remember hearing all about the filming in New Orleans and was DYING to catch a glimpse of Hollywood stardom while they were there.
The movie starred Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise….two VERY VERY big deal actors of the time period… and VERY VERY attractive to my teenage self (I am SURE this added a great to my excitement of seeing this story come to life on the big screen 😆)
Younger me was quite disappointed with what I saw….while there were snippets of the book and the overall story was the same, there was SO MUCH left out and SO MUCH done off character….one of my first experiences of proving that the book is ALWAYS better than the movie.
ALWAAAYYYYSSSSSS.
Important life lesson to learn.
I came across this book again recently at the library and was like “I remember being SO INTO this book. Maybe I should read it again…”
Now listen…as an adult, I do not usually reread books. Or rewatch shows or movies. (except holiday movies…those are in a category in and of themselves!!)
I totally understand that for some people it’s like comfort food for their brain to reindulge in something familiar.
And I did it ALL THE TIME as a kid.
But nowadays, I just think there are so many options in the world to enjoy and explore, why would I want to waste time consuming something I have already consumed?
Rereading a book is a weird and very unlikely thing for me to do….but I often say I can be a walking contradiction of a person, so here ya go.🤷♀️
As I began to read this familiar story again, I realized I forgot lots of the intricacies of this story…like OMG Claudia was only FIVE YEARS OLD when she became a vampire! Say WHHHUTTTTT 🤯
That added a WHOLE LOT of uncomfortableness for me as her relationship with Louie transformed from a father daughter type of vibe to more of a lover type of vibe as the years ticked on and on.
It was not NEAR as bad as the “old vampire in a very young body” mess in the book “Fledgling” I read not too long ago. In THAT book, there were specific descriptions of VERY sexual acts between tiny kid vampire and very adult human which I just could NOT get past. This book does not have all that BUT it did have plenty of squirm worthy, odd moments with the same type of creepy essence.
I don’t remember that popping up on my radar much when I was a teen reading this…and it definitely was not addressed in detail in the movie version.
Other than that weirdness, I was transfixed with this story all over again with the same lure and fascination I had a few decades back.
Ohhhh, the conflicted Louie…always grappling with the purpose of his immortality, the meaning of who he is, the constant battle of how he is to adjust to the life of a vampire. My adult self loves him just as much as my teen self did.
I am pleased to say all the feels and vibes remain for me with this rereading.
Still a fan and still captivated, even with the strange tiny kid vampire crap.
Oddly enough, I have never read the other books in the Vampire Chronicles and COMPLETELY FORGOT this was book 1 in a whole entire series. 😱
Definitely going to indulge in them ALL.
I checked out book 2 ,”The Vampire Lestat”, immediately when this one ended….my vampiric journey continues….