Interview with the Vampire

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Louis de Pointe de Lac is 200 years old, but this is not because of a gluten-free diet. As a French migrant whose family had established a new life in Louisiana, he had been living a good life as an indigo plantation owner when a vampire named Lestat de Lioncourt decided to leave two bite marks on his neck. As Louis’ humanity died, he was introduced to a life of immortality as a blood sucker fatally allergic to the sun and spending most of his day asleep in a coffin. What follows is a rollercoaster ride with his new friend, their vampiric ways differing greatly as far as hunting and diet preferences are concerned. Soon, they turn an orphan girl named Claudia into one of them, which is not really a good idea considering she would be a woman trapped in a young girl’s body just decades later. All this Louis narrates via an interview with an eager journalist who wants to introduce him to the world.

Before vampires sparkled under the sun and began harboring an inexplicable obsession with Kristen Stewart, they were French migrants in New Orleans living either an emo or a rock and roll existence, depending on which blood sucker you are referring to. Of course we already had Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a template at the turn of the 19th century, but Anne Rice deserves some kudos for making vampires fashionable again, at least in the 70’s and the 80’s. We can even go as far as to argue that Louis and Lestat have been the prototype of these quintessential dashing debonairs with a lust for blood. Debatably, this novel should be to blame for the trend.

I bought the first four books of the Vampire Chronicles two decades ago and all they did was collect dust on the bookshelf. It’s not that I don’t like Anne Rice. On the contrary, I was just more enamored with her Mayfair Witches, which means it was the Mayfair Chronicles that I devoted most of my time to. It was a bit traumatizing because The Witching Hour is a thousand pages long, but what that reading experience brought about was a familiarity with the author’s style of storytelling which can be very visual, making her set pieces, whether it be New Orleans or the Caribbean, jump out of the page. This novel is no different.

Mostly set in Louisiana, Interview with the Vampire’s second act unfolds in Europe, straddling Bulgaria and Paris. Anne Rice has a knack for country hopping as far as her novels are concerned. Here we are taken to an adventure in Europe to discover the origins of these vampires. As we get there, their mythology starts making sense, and the somehow brooding ambience is just further intensified by the setting. The striking contrast between life and the pace thereof in New Orleans and Europe also allows the reader to bask in a certain duality which is a prevalent theme in the novel.

As for characters, Louis is your typical emo vampire, probably the prototype for every popular one that has followed since Interview with the Vampire was released. His guilty conscience and reluctance to act on his animalistic nature bore you really fast. Perhaps this is the reason why the other two morally ambiguous characters easily swoop in to arrest your attention. While Lestat and Claudia have to share the limelight with Louis most of the time, it is actually them who prods you to go on reading until the very end. Maybe it has something to do with their character development that they end up upstaging the main character.

As if this isn’t already obvious enough, it appears as though the next entries of the Vampire Chronicles are all focused on Lestat one way or another. The author has definitely milked this character so much, yet I am curious as to how she will be developing his role in the sequels. It is a shame that Claudia’s story seemingly ends here, but rest assured that she need not do much to steal most of this novel because she simply outshines everyone, even Lestat. Given how this novel served as a sort of grieving process for Rice for the death of her daughter, it lends the character of Claudia a whole different layer of tragedy and gloom.