Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice
Summary
In a small room in modern San Francisco, a vampire named Louis de Pointe du Lac tells his two hundred year story to a young reporter, a framing device that runs through the entire novel. Louis explains that in 1791, grieving his brother's death and drowning in guilt he believed was partly his own fault, he let the charismatic, amoral vampire Lestat de Lioncourt turn him on his own Louisiana plantation. Louis resists killing humans for as long as he can, feeding instead on animals, while Lestat mocks his squeamishness and revels openly in the power vampirism has given him. On a visit to plague ravaged New Orleans, the pair find a young girl, Claudia, orphaned beside her dead mother, and Lestat turns her too, apparently to bind Louis more permanently to him through a shared child. Claudia grows into a vampire with an adult mind trapped forever inside a five year old's body, and her fury over that trap eventually turns on Lestat directly: she poisons him and, when that fails to finish him, she and Louis cut his throat and dump him in a swamp, believing him dead. Louis and Claudia flee to Europe searching for other vampires and some explanation of what they actually are, eventually finding a coven led by the ancient, elegant Armand at the Théâtre des Vampires in Paris. The coven, appalled that a vampire killed another vampire, tries and executes Claudia along with Madeleine, a doll maker Claudia had turned to be a new mother for herself; Louis escapes, burns the theater down in revenge, and eventually returns alone to New Orleans, worn down by immortality rather than thrilled by it any longer. The reporter, having heard all of this as a cautionary tale about the emptiness of eternal life, is unmoved by the warning and asks Louis to turn him instead, then goes looking for Lestat, still alive after all, to grant the wish Louis himself refused.
Rice tells the whole story in Louis's own mournful, richly sensory voice, and that voice is the book's real innovation, treating vampirism as an existential burden and a form of grief rather than simply a monster story, closer to a gothic memoir than to horror as it had usually been written before this.
Historical Context & Significance
Alfred A. Knopf published Interview with the Vampire in 1976, after Rice expanded it from a short story she had written years earlier; she wrote much of the finished novel not long after her young daughter Michele died of leukemia in 1972, and Claudia's fate, an adult mind trapped inside a child's body, has been read since as a direct response to that loss. No literary prize marked its release, and reviews split hard on it. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch praised its hypnotically poetic, sensory prose, while Leo Braudy, reviewing it for the New York Times, called it superficial and impersonal, and Edith Milton, writing in the New Republic, went further still, dismissing the book outright as rank hypocrisy.
It became a sustained commercial success rather than a critical one, selling eight million copies worldwide by 2008 and launching Rice's long running Vampire Chronicles series that eventually ran to more than a dozen books. Neil Jordan's 1994 film, with Brad Pitt as Louis and Tom Cruise as Lestat, carried the novel back onto bestseller lists nearly two decades after its first printing.