368 pages, Ballantine Books, ISBN-13: 978-0345281265
If you ask me, Anne Rice shoulda stopped with Interview with the Vampire; this book, all on its own, is an excellent work of gothic horror that stretches its aesthetic to include romance, historic fiction and tragedy. Really, it’s a good book…as to the others in the so-called Vampire Chronicles – which, as of this writing, included twelve sequels, not including New Tales of the Vampires or Lives of the Mayfair Witches – what was a fine stand-alone work has become this bloated travesty in which it was obvious that Rice didn’t know how to quit. I get wanting to expand your literary universe and to tell the tales of other characters you have thought up, but each book is a marked disappointment compared to the original. Ah, well…we all know what they say about sequels.
So then…Interview with the Vampire is the 200-year-long story of Louis de Pointe du Lac as told by him to a reporter referred to simply as “the boy”. In 1791, Louis is a young indigo plantation owner living in Louisiana. Distraught by the death of his brother, he seeks death in any way possible, which is when he is approached by a vampire named Lestat de Lioncourt, who desires Louis’ immortal company. Lestat turns Louis into a vampire and the two become immortal companions. Lestat spends time feeding off slaves while Louis, who finds it morally repugnant to murder humans to survive, feeds from animals. Louis and Lestat are forced to leave when Louis’ slaves begin to fear the vampires and instigate an uprising.
Louis sets his own plantation aflame while he and Lestat also kill the slaves to keep word from spreading about vampires living in Louisiana. Gradually, Louis bends under Lestat’s diabolical influence and begins at last to feed on humans, slowly coming to terms with his vampiric nature, but also becoming increasingly repulsed by what he perceives as Lestat’s total lack of compassion for the humans he preys upon. Escaping to New Orleans, Louis feeds off a plague-ridden, 5-year-old girl whom he finds next to the corpse of her mother. Louis begins to think of leaving Lestat and going his own way but, fearing this, Lestat then turns the girl into a vampire “daughter” for them, to give Louis a reason to stay. She is then given the name Claudia. But enough spoiling…
What to make of Interview with the Vampire? Perhaps the most obvious lesson taught is that being a vampire is not all its cracked up to be. Eternal life and youth sound like great ideas, but at the cost of taking innocent life after innocent life and how that corrupts and destroys one’s soul (for lack of a better word). In Lestat we see one possible result in his utter ruthlessness; in Louis we see another eventual outcome in his world-weariness and regret at what he has become; and in Claudia we have a bit of both, in that she is as ruthless as Lestat but as regretful as Louis. So immortality sucks, as one can never change or build or create something that will outlast you. You do not live. You do not die. You…just are.
Interview with the Vampire may have started the trend that’s still around today of seeing vampires as tragic and romantic beings more to be pitied than feared, and to an extent that is true. But many of the other messages found throughout the book seem to have been lost on these later-day writers, for if one comes away from this novel wanting to actually become a vampire then one is whacked. While Lestat and, to a lesser extent, Claudia revel in their existences, their unlives are irrelevant, a fact that the much-despised but more-enlightened Louis understands all too well. It is us mere mortals that have something to live for, for our all-too-brief lives are, in fact, to be envied and cherished, unlike the meaningless existences of vampires. Just ask Louis.
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