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Fantasy. Fiction. Horror. Thriller. HTML: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 lit… (more)
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I finished it some time early in the morning, slept through most of the day, and that afternoon, opened it up and read it again. Later that week, when she got back from camp and was brushing her teeth (30 minutes with baking soda) I negotiated a trade with Karen -- my Peter Frampton poster for the book. I had to have it. I almost had to throw in the blacklight poster, but Karen was a bigger Frampton fan than I was.
For a 13 year old in the late 70s, Interview was heady, heady stuff. I could barely remember Dark Shadows, had seen perhaps half of some cheesy Dracula movie, and tended to think of vampires in terms of Count Chocula and Grampa from The Munsters. Yarbro hadn't crossed my radar and possibly wasn't in my local library. This book? This was dark and passionate, sensual and sexual, intoxicating and mysterious, unbearably sad, deeply angry. Yeah, a lot for a 13 year old to drink in.
How exactly do I convey my memory of Rice's New Orleans velvet heat? How do I describe my mental vision of Louis (who looked nothing like Brad Pitt) and Lestat (who looked like anyone but Tom Cruise!)? I can't recount the speeding heartbeats that echoed in my ears as I read. I don't remember pages or words or text at all. I floated ghostly over the streets of Paris, witnessing depravity and cruelty and obsession, love and sacrifice, touching the satins, feeling the breath. The novel caressed my skin and whispered to me.
Nothing else I've read by Rice -- and I did try -- achieved the power of this outpouring of madness and grief. I've read the book several times since that particular summer of hair rock and Hardy Boys and, while I'm aware it has flaws (the angst! Oh, the angst!) none of them affect that smokey music and incense infused darkness the book still has. It opened the door to the now tired and wrung-out sexy-vamp trend, set the tone for a genre, took vampires out of their Victorian euphemism and innuendo, and produced them anew in the imagination, more violent, more real, and certainly more deeply wired into the psyche and body. While it harkens to those earlier versions in penny-dreadfuls and B movies, it doesn't lean on them or owe them much for its existence (certainly not the way much of the modern genre lean on it).
For me, it will be always locked into place in a certain summer on a narrow bed under the poster of a long haired guitarist.
One of the reasons I found this a riveting read is that Rice writes in a clean,
Another part of what makes this vampire story unusual is that it is about the education of a vampire in what he is and how to survive. Few vampire stories I've read are from the vampire's point of view. They're either books of those trying to flee or fight them or those in love or lust with the glamorized, eroticized version Rice did so much to promote. Louis is interesting in that he never fully gives up his humanity. This makes him an apt narrator into the vampire world he shares with Lestat--and later his companion Claudia, a vampire they made forever trapped into the body of a five year old girl.
That last is one of the creepiest aspects of the novel--the adult, sensuous and sexual person within a child's body. And goodness, Louis can be tediously emo at times. But it's mostly a good read and seminal in the genre and still strikingly original in several respects--I'm glad I read it. I'm not however motivated to read more in this series.
My most definable objection to the work as a whole, and probably the most nitpicky, was her constant, abrupt jumps to 'present day' and the interviewer. The audience only has to be told once that there is a framing story. They do not need to be jerked out of the narrative repeatedly to make the point. Much like Big Fish. He did the same thing there. She stopped later in the story, which also might be a reason why I enjoyed the latter half more than the first.
This is another one of the few books which I enjoyed better as a movie. They did a lot of editing and interpretation to shrink it down to the time they did, and I think it helped. Much of the book was lost in purple prose descriptions of objects and events which would have been better if summarized briefly. More of an impact.
I'm happy I read it, still, since I like knowing the type of writing which is currently 'best selling', and trying to understand why popular things are popular. My tastes just missed with this one. Severely. I don't think I was even looking at the same target. 1/10
And then you watch Buffy for several years and realize that Spike AND Angel would have laughed themselves *sick* over Louis' navel-gazing ("Dude, if you're so depressed over being a vampire, just go knock on Faith's door and flash some fang- she'll dust you in a New York minute!") and rolled their eyes over Lestat's psycho-babble.
But, still, it captures that "Beautiful/Lonely/Deadly" kind of feeling- and many of today's ParaRom books owe their very existence to this book and its sequels.
In the foreword to my library edition, Audrey Niffenegger suggests that Ann Rice 'discovered' the 'existential despair, the tedium and attractions of immortality, the moral quandaries of the vampire diet'. And interviewee Louis is certainly a literary template for vampire angst - he never shuts up! For three hundred pages, give or take incidences of death, destruction and relocation to a different country, Louis harps on mortal sin, God and the devil, love and hate, the beauty of life, the futility and torture of immortality, and how lonely undeath can be. Whenever Lestat threatened to put an end to his 'suffering', I was thinking, 'Yes, please, do!'
The premise of a centuries-old vampire telling his story to a 'modern day' mortal is simple and satisfying, and Louis' narrative voice is a suitable blend of nineteenth century formality and cynical experience, but his 'existential despair' gets boring very quickly. I prefer the truly evil vampires, like Lestat, who accept what they are and kill to survive, not dithering do-gooders who don't want to hurt anyone. Get over yourself, Louis. And pint-size vampirette Claudia, who does have a valid complaint after all, is a disturbing character - a grown woman trapped in the body of a five year old. I had trouble imagining what she would look like, dressed up like a doll and coming onto Louis (*shudder*).
Although this is only the first novel in the series, Interview must be the last nail in my vampire coffin. I have absolutely no desire to read about Lestat or Armand, sorry to say!
I'm glad I reread the book but have no desire to
I gave it 3.5 on BookLikes.
It does several things that appeal to me very much. The first is that it captures atmosphere, and personality, beautifully. In places the language of the book feels over-heavy, but its central conceit - that it is entirely told in the words of a man born in the eighteenth century, now over two hundred years old - not only explains this, but helps build and shape it into something really interesting.
The second is related, in that Interview spends a great deal of time asking very interesting questions about the nature of immortality, morality, and human nature. Does a man ever escape the age in which he is born? Can he? How much change can a person accept before they are unwilling or unable to accept any more? When time means nothing, what then does life, or death, really mean? What /does/ hold meaning? Can there be good or evil when one lives outside of these confines?
Louis is an insufferably emo narrator at times (although it's this quality that gives us so many interesting questions posed with such convincing inner turmoil), and the book gets much better when first Claudia, and then Armand appears. Every character in this book is drawn for some purpose, to explore some question or aspect of nature, and it gives me the feeling that there is a great deal beneath the surface, if I wanted to dig.
I have mixed feelings about this book, I suppose, but in the opposite manner from my usual. Typically, I find myself racing through a book, adoring it in the read, and then finding the faults upon reflection. This book was a slower read, not as instantly engaging, but I find myself more and more invested in it the more I think about it, or talk about it. I was hindered a bit, I think, by the movie - which is actually such an excellent adaptation of what occurs in the book that much of the need to find out what happens next was stolen away.
I can see why these books are considered to be classics of their genre, and I will probably pick up at least The Vampire Lestat to see where it goes.
From this vantage-point, however, it is hard to read the tale with that fresh perspective. I know Lestat through and through now. His exploits and motivations are ingrained on my memory and knowing his backstory makes me understand him more and sympathize with Claudia and Louis less.
They do deserve some sympathy though. It’s obvious now that Lestat was both using them to mark time as per Marius’s request, and experimenting with them; pushing the boundaries he so loved to push. He also needed to forget Gabrielle, Nicholas and Armand.
His silence about his origins and motives, as well as his silence about his and Louis’s newly formed species is needlessly cruel. So much could have been avoided if he just unbelted with some info. And he had plenty after having searched for and found Marius, not to mention his time with Armand. But, giving so much of his power away would have made Lestat unbearably vulnerable in his eyes, so he kept silent.
The creation of Claudia was just him pushing the boundaries. I think in the next book he says he did it merely to see what would happen. A spur of the moment dare in the face of all that was vampire proper. When he wasn’t immediately struck dead or lit out after by other vampires, he got bored with it. Then when she came to hate him, it was already too late. I don’t blame Claudia her hatred. And Louis was no help. He was just overwhelmed and doing the best he could.
One aspect that never struck me before was Armand’s longing for Louis and how terrible it would have been for Louis to know that he was a second choice. If Armand couldn’t have Lestat as acolyte and companion, he would take Louis. Also, I bet that Armand saw a lot of Nicholas in Louis and hoped that he could save this second of Lestat’s “children”. In the end, I think he did. The pain of Claudia’s death would have eaten Louis alive.
But instead of Louis’s decline, we get that of Lestat. The first time I read it, I was mystified as to why he would ensconce himself away in a moldering mansion living off of the blood of alley cats. I didn’t know the desperate self-loathing he lived with that drove him to these fits of unworthiness. Not long after Louis leaves him and his new acolyte as well, I know that Lestat goes into the earth a second time.
If only the rest of the series were as good as Interview and Lestat.
I've little interest in vampires, but within thirty pages of Anne Rice's first novel her smoothly flowing prose captured me. The entire narrative is presented as dialogue, so that we are always in the framing story. This sometimes has a jarring effect. Despite all the quotation marks as reminders, something said in the context of the frame often required a moment to reorient myself. There's a simple remedy I'm surprised the author didn't use, but I grew accustomed to her approach. Louis' dark ruminations might occasionally be too frequent or too prolonged, but the novel always kept me engaged and exceeded my expectations.
But I couldn't get into this because it felt rather pointless. It didn't feel like the characters were headed anywhere. There was no character growth. Nothing was compelling about any of the characters. And I found the whole thing rather disgusting. It's basically