Why did I like this book so much? Why is Anne Rice simultaneously a literary genius and batshit insane?
I shouldn't have liked this book, anyway; there were a lot of little things that irked me while I was reading it - but in the end, there I was completely engrossed again. Raglan is a kickass weirdo of a character (and her descriptions of his movements in the fantastically creepy lead-up to his introduction have stuck with me for half a decade now); she's still obviously a liiiittle bit too obsessively in love with her own Lestat, to the point the brattiness he (and she) takes such pride in gets annoying, but his first (re)impressions of the human world are, like everything Ricean, so expertly crafted and weirdly insightful that I ended up thinking of this book every time I drank orange juice for something like six months.
Also, he finally gets to have sex with someone! Or, you know, a lot of someones. Bizarrely, for an author whose entire oeuvre ooooozes unresolved sexual tension, it was deeply anticlimactic (har). Pages were flipped with a depressing since of Ew what do you even see in her, Eurgh he is SO OLD, Ugh you are supposed to be on a MISSION what is this, etc.
Also Louis was in it for approximately ten seconds, which is not NEARLY enough.