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Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)

Anne Rice

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Aug 04, 2022 Owen DeVries rated it really liked it

Why shouldn’t monsters get a chance to tell their side of the story?

Well, they finally got an opportunity in the 1960s and 1970s, and I don't doubt this had something to do with the tenor of the times. Marginalized groups were finally shaping their own narratives, from Selma to Stonewall, and power brokers had no choice but to take notice. So why not other excluded individuals and communities: the vampire, the monster, the killer, the madwoman in the attic? We see precisely this turnabout in nov Why shouldn’t monsters get a chance to tell their side of the story?

Well, they finally got an opportunity in the 1960s and 1970s, and I don't doubt this had something to do with the tenor of the times. Marginalized groups were finally shaping their own narratives, from Selma to Stonewall, and power brokers had no choice but to take notice. So why not other excluded individuals and communities: the vampire, the monster, the killer, the madwoman in the attic? We see precisely this turnabout in novels such as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966), John Gardner's Grendel (1971), Stephen King's Carrie (1974), and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (1976). These outsiders also had their stories to tell, and the novelists of the era were determined to give them a soapbox.

The idea of letting the monster speak was hardly a new concept. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's Monster was a talkative sort, but in later versions of her story he grew taciturn. Except for The Bride of Frankenstein, in which Boris Karloff got quite a few lines, the Universal horror films were built on the idea that monsters, like well-behaved children, should be seen and rarely heard. You could add up all the dialogue from the Mummy, the Wolfman, Dracula and Creature from the Black Lagoon, starting in the 1930s until the 1960s, and fit it on a tiny Egyptian papyrus.

But monsters in the 1960s and 1970s played by different rules. In Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, our bloodsucker starts talking...and never stops. The entire novel, except for a handful of passages of description and interrogation from our interviewer, is devoted to the first-person narration of Louis de Pointe du Lac, a two-hundred-year-old vampire. He starts telling his life story soon after nightfall and is still going strong as we approach dawn on the following morning. The tape recorder keeps running all night long-nowadays our garrulous fiend would probably have his own YouTube channel-and the story never gets dull. Who would have thought a vampire would make such a fine raconteur?

But let's also give Anne Rice some credit here. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that I approached this novel with low expectations. What I knew of Rice's personal life and public pronouncements, with their apparent contradictions and abrupt shifts, led me to anticipate a campy, neo-goth story filled with outrageous incidents and gratuitous grotesqueries. Before reading Interview with the Vampire, I didn't know much about the book beyond the basic premise, and though I hadn't seen the movie, I did know it starred Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and Kirsten Dunst. Nothing here gave me much confidence in the literary merits of what seemed to be, at first glance, a trashy supermarket novel.

Ah, how unfair I was! I'm still not nominating Anne Rice for a Nobel Prize in literature, but Interview with the Vampire, is a nuanced, introspective novel. I might call it a psychological novel, or even an existential novel. Our protagonist, as self-reflective as a Dostoevsky hero, could well be branded as a failure as a vampire! He hardly puts any attention into finding victims, and instead cogitates on the meaning of his life-or can it even be called life? he wonders. He agonizes over his ethical choices, and the metaphysical implications of his betwixt-and-between status. When he finally meets up with the wisest vampire in Europe, midway through the novel, they don't waste time comparing blood sausage recipes. Instead he wants to know whether vampires are children of Satan. At every juncture in this novel, questions of conscience and responsibility loom larger than macabre matters. And if forced to sum up the theme of the book in a sentence, I would suggest that it revolves around whether vampires can find true love in a hostile world.

I'm hardly surprised that this novel attracted a devoted following in the LGBT community, and not just because of the intense relationships between the male vampires in the story. Actually vampires aren't interested in sex, at least in the context of this novel-they go straight for the veins, and neglect the customary erogenous zones. But from every other perspective, this work resonates with in-the-closet and out-of-the-closet issues. In particular, Rice explores with insight and sensitivity the inner workings of a close-knit subculture operating within mainstream society, and probes the way the rules of the two groups both clash and coexist.

The book opens in late twentieth-century San Francisco, where an unnamed young man has secured an interview with our vampire hero. This opening feels a bit rushed-we don't even get introduced to the interviewer, who is merely referred to as "the boy"-instead our vampire immediately plunges into the story of his life. Louis was born in France, but at a young age his family brought him to a plantation in Louisiana, not far from New Orleans. Here he was seduced by an older vampire named Lestat, who soon turned Louis into a follow member of the undead via a do-it-yourself transfusion. In time, the couple add another vampire to their alternative family, a young girl named Claudia. But Lestat's arrogance and unwillingness to share his arcane knowledge of vampire lore stirs up discontent on the home front. Claudia eventually kills Lestat-or at least, believes she has done so-and leaves with Louis on a trip to Europe to discover their vampire roots. But Transylvania doesn't work out quite as planned, and they soon settle down in a luxury hotel in Paris. Here they hobnob with other fiends of the night and Louis finds a new BFF, a 500-year-old vampire named Armand. But Old World and New World bloodsuckers don't mix well. I won't go into detail, but imagine a conflict between rival Mafia gangs, only with vampires instead of wise guys.

Presented in this rapid-fire manner, the plot is unpromising. But Rice never gets bogged down in the gore. Her vampire protagonists are melancholy aesthetes, and this puts a distinctive and unconventional stamp on Interview with the Vampire. When Louis faces a personal crisis, he heads to an art museum to contemplate the paintings. Even the crude Lestat spends his spare time at the opera house, or attending productions of Shakespeare. Rice comes up with a clever plot angle to justify this unusual approach to a horror novel. According to her taxonomy of monsterdom, vampires possess uncanny sensibilities-this makes them acutely aware of smells, sounds, colors, and shapes. Hence, even the lowliest vampire has all the makings of an art connoisseur, and the best put John Ruskin and Bernard Berenson to shame. As a result, Rice has an excuse to dwell on the sights and sounds of her settings, and adorn her narrative with a rich tapestry of detail. This, obviously, puts a burden on her own pen. More description is not always better description. But Rice succeeds, for the most part. Her vampires are observant participants, not just heedless killers, and this combination of blood lust and rich empirical insight imparts a peculiar, yet appealing ambiance to the novel.

But Interview with the Vampire is not without its flaws. The plot has enough holes to fill the Albert Hall. How can a vampire kill and drain the blood of a victim every day, over the course of centuries, and never excite the interest of the police? How do vampires set up shop in various luxury hotels, and never have a maid or servant notice the coffins? I realize that fantasy is built on the willing suspension of disbelief, but Rice asks for too much from the reader. Yet the biggest shortcoming here arises from the central premise of the novel: the notion that this narrative is part of an interview is not adequately supported by the author. The interviewer makes a few token appearances early in the book, and then disappears for the entire second half of the novel, only returning briefly at the book's conclusion. At times, Rice even seems ready to shift over to a third-person narrative. We aren't told the name of the questioner, or even the profession, for that matter. I assume that the interviewer is a journalist, but that is simply a guess on my part. As a result, the framing story never captures the reader's interest. Rice tries to take it somewhere in the last paragraphs of book, but by then it is too late. It's hard for us to care about an interlocutor we never got a chance to know.

But these problems won’t hinder your enjoyment of the novel. Interview with the Vampire could have succeeded even without the extravagant notion of a taped interview between mortal and monster. Rice writes with more literary flair than you will typically encounter in a genre novel, and never resorts to the tawdry tricks of the Twilight teen tomes. Frankly I am surprised that a psychological novel of this sort, leisurely paced and often understated, would find such a large audience. But this bestseller kicked off a mini-industry, with Rice writing more than a dozen other vampire books, not to mention various spin-offs and imitations.

In many ways, this author laid the foundation for the vampire mania of the new millennium. When I go into my local bookstore, I see a whole section of vampire books. So many, that I would like to put a stake in their heart, and sprinkle garlic around the shelves. Maybe if we got rid of these, we could make room for some highbrow volumes, no? But, yes, I’d make an exception for this tale, which deserves a much better fate than its anemic shelf mates. ...more

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Nov 26, 2011 ImScared3222 rated it it was ok

Aug 03, 2017 Jess Penhallow is currently reading it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-next, own-hard-copy

Jan 04, 2020 Brooke Bowers rated it it was ok

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