Interview with the Vampire by A Rice

Interview with the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles, #1)

by A Rice

40th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, "a magnificent, compulsively readable thriller...Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth—the education of the vampire” (Chicago Tribune). • The inspiration for the hit television series

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 two hundred 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.

Reviewed by Amber (The Literary Phoenix) on

2 of 5 stars

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Oh Anne Rice. I have a difficult time understanding why I loved your books so much when I was in high school.

Honestly? Interview with the Vampire is just plain boring. It is told in interview format, but 95% of the book is just Louis talking. For as poetic a speaker Louis may be, telling your entire story in dialogue means description is sparse. And the way Interview With the Vampire is told, it is in first person past tense so everything was reflective. When something exciting or terrifying was happening to Louis, Lestat, and Claudia… I was just bored. Because Louis is so detached from all the events in his life, his does nothing to intrigue the reader. He spends his immortal life wishing he was human and to feel purposeful and alive again, and everything falls short. And, so Interview With the Vampire, too, falls short.

Characters outside of Louis are far more interesting. Claudia, for one, is horrible and terrifying. Lestat, of course, is a curious, interesting character. Several books later in the Vampire Chronicles are told from Lestat’s POV, and from my recollection, those books are exponentially more interesting. We know a little of Louis’ past and the people he cared for, but there’s not enough depth of emotion in him at all for the reader to get attached. Lestat has passion, Claudia has malice… Louis has patient discontent. Patient discontent is not interesting.

This novel spans from New Orleans to Venice and back, and while I didn’t love The Witching Hour, I know Anne Rice has the capability of bring New Orleans to life. She showed none of that charm in her world building for Interview With the Vampire. From a more pretentious POV, I think I can say that she didn’t bother with the depths of setting because it would interrupt the flow of the storytelling. But, again, I didn’t care for this choice. She relies entirely too much on Louis to bring interest to the story, but Louis would rather argue the philosophies of good and evil to the point of redundancy.

Honestly, I think the heart of my problem here is that I didn’t like Louis. Because the story is told from his POV and from his pace and honestly for a vampire, he isn’t very interesting… I didn’t enjoy the book. Anne Rice is in the habit of writing long books that go nowhere. Interview With the Vampire is no exception. Her vampires are interesting, but there’s not a lot of discussion into their biology – more their philosophical natures. We know they must kill every night and that they can subside on any blood. They cannot go out in the sun and they are excruciatingly difficult to kill otherwise. We know they have fangs and that, according to Louis’ very long philosophical observations through the extent of this novel – they are inherently evil.

So that’s what I got from this book. 15 hours of: “Surprise! Vampires are evil, because they clearly aren’t good.” No alluring scenes, no memorable characters. If Interview With the Vampire had been published now instead of 1976 when books such as this were virtually unheard of, I do not believe it would have been so iconic.

It’s classic vampire literature. It’s not swoon-worthy. It’s not particularly thrilling. But it’s classic. Read at your own risk.

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