The Vampire Lestat
The volume that built the Vampire Chronicles into a saga and a phenomenon — Lestat became the model immortal antihero, and the book's vampire-as-rock-star conceit defined gothic culture's 1980s–90s imagination.
Book Entry · Horror
Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice · 1976 · The Vampire Chronicles, book 1
What is Interview with the Vampire about?
In a San Francisco room, a vampire tells a boy with a tape recorder his two hundred years: Louis, the Louisiana planter who accepted Lestat's dark gift in 1791 and has regretted the company ever since; the child Claudia, made immortal at five and ripening into a woman's mind trapped in a doll's body — the book's great horror and its great grief, written from Rice's loss of her own daughter; the Théâtre des Vampires, and the discovery that the old world holds no answers, only older vampires. The confessional structure made the monster the consciousness, and the genre has never reversed it.
Why it matters
The founding text of sympathetic vampire fiction — ancestor of everything from Buffy's brooding ensemble to paranormal romance entire — filmed in 1994 with Cruise and Pitt and serialised by AMC; among the bestselling horror novels ever.
Where does it sit in the series?
Louis, Lestat, Claudia and the immortal demi-monde of New Orleans and Paris: Rice's saga of vampires as narrators, philosophers and catastrophic romantics.
In the Guide from The Vampire Chronicles:
- Interview with the Vampire (1976)
- The Vampire Lestat (1985)
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