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Book Entry · Horror
by Anne Rice · 1985 · The Vampire Chronicles, book 2
Lestat wakes in 1984, reads Louis's unflattering memoir, and does the only proportionate thing: forms a rock band, announces vampirism to the world from a stage, and writes his own version. The autobiography that follows — provincial French nobility, Paris theatre, the dark gift taken violently, the quest through Marius to Those Who Must Be Kept, the Egyptian roots of the entire bloodline — converts Rice's mythology from chamber piece to epic, and replaces Louis's mourning with Lestat's magnificent appetite: the 'brat prince' as the Chronicles' true voice. The cliffhanger (Akasha's eyes opening) detonates directly into The Queen of the Damned.
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.
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:
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.
The most influential horror novel in the language: the source code for vampire fiction and a permanent fixture of world culture, from Nosferatu and the Lugosi and Lee films onward.
Widely rated among the best vampire novels of the century — Martin's pre-Westeros masterpiece, demonstrating the moral-greyness machinery a decade before A Game of Thrones, and a clear ancestor of the sympathetic-vampire mainstream.