Interview With the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles, volume 1) by Anne Rice

[james_davis_nicoll]

Can anyone pity poor, unfortunate immortal vampire Louis as much as poor, unfortunate immortal vampire Louis pities himself? Louis plans to find out.

Interview With the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles, volume 1) by Anne Rice

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I read this book back in the day but I don't remember much about it!

Some of the later books in the series made more of an impression on me.

You give a nice plot summary and comparison with the other book, but what did you think of it? What about the writing? Did it work for you as a book?

[james_davis_nicoll]

It's an effective portrayal of damaged people that I feel no need to follow up on.

[princessofgeeks]

Tnx!

[hippogriff13]

I read it back in the day, too. Aside from the problematical addition of Claudia to Louis and Lestat's little family, I don't recall that much of the stuff James discussed in his review. I'd somehow managed to forget about both Lestat's brilliant idea of using the slaves on Louis' plantation as a food source and the slave uprising this led to. Although I do remember an odd interlude in which Rice presented Louis as a sort of antebellum proto-feminist who attempted to help the human heiress to a neighboring plantation maintain control of her estate and the business decisions regarding it, only to have her ultimately crack under the pressure of society's disapproval of such gender-inappropriate behavior. I believe she actually went mad, or at least wound up being committed to an insane asylum (not necessarily the same thing when it came to nineteenth century women who allegedly behaved inappropriately).

If I remember correctly, the novel ended with Louis disappearing and the reporter vowing to track him--or some other vampire--down in order to get turned into a vampire himself. Considering what an angstfest Louis' account of his life (unlife?) so far had been, I found this decision pretty baffling.

[oursin]

I have been trying to recall the vampire novel in which the vampire protag actually goes to a therapist, and realise that this must have been Suzy McKee Charnas, The Vampire Tapestry (1980) (which I see you have already reviewed).

[(Anonymous)]

Not "Fangalyze This" then, which no one has written yet. ;-)

Robert Carnegie

[jreynolds197]

Perhaps this one is the one James will review next week.

[oh6]

I think both your speculations about Goodreads are very likely true.

I hadn't expected there to be any surprises in the review, but the structure, the setting, and the circumstances in which the novel was written were all new to me. Unlike Abba, just because a book was ubiquitous in my youth doesn't mean I'll know anything about it.

[rushthatspeaks]

I deeply appreciate the reinvention of the new TV series, with both Louis and Claudia as black people in innately precarious positions in an innately horrific society; I think the result is a more interesting look at both New Orleans history and the ongoing intersections of race and power than Rice's original.

... I also find it quietly hilarious that basically as soon as Rice died and stopped preventing it an adaptation appeared with a lot of explicit and textual gay sex. Like, everyone but Rice knew what was up here, and she knew, she just very publicly did not want to know, and had weird hangups about sex and adaptations alike. The public batshittery of Rice's behavior about her own work, fanfiction, New Orleans, and life in general provided bemused entertainment for multiple generations of fans. I, for one, was vaguely sorry when she died simply because there was never any way to tell what she was going to do next, except that it would be completely insane; that said, her death enabled her fans and pop culture in general to have what I consider a much healthier relationship with her work.

[patrick_morris_miller]

her death enabled her fans and pop culture in general to have what I consider a much healthier relationship with her work.

You are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.

(if this sounds off: those are Rice's own words)

[mindstalk]

I vaguely remember a bunch of same-sex sex in her pen-named "Sleeping Beauty" books, though it's been a long time.

[rushthatspeaks]

Oh, yah, she was fine with it in her pseudonymous erotica, just not in her by-her-real-name Serious Literature.

One of my favorite tweets of all time is the one where Christopher Rice replied to 'Tell me you're gay without telling me you're gay' with "My mother is literally Anne Rice."

[estrevan]

I’m pretty sure there was fade-to-black offstage gay sex in Vampire Lestat, at least. But it’s been a very long time since I read it

[chrysostom]

Brad Pitt! Tom Cruise! Christian Slater! Kirsten Dunst!

[magedragonfire]

Re: protagonist vampires before Rice - wasn't Barnabas Collins novelized by that one very prolific Saint Johner who went by a million pen names? That had to have started a few years before Interview.

[hippogriff13]

Barnabas was definitely presented as a tragic figure in the Dark Shadows TV series. According to Wikipedia, the original version of the show (there was a short-lived revival about twenty years later) aired from 1966-1971. "Interview with the Vampire" was published in 1976. So Rice probably watched the show, which quickly became at least a cult hit at the time (it actually spawned at least one spin-off Hollywood movie, way before the one in which Johnny Depp played Barnabas). Given the timing, "Dark Shadows" was probably at least a subliminal influence on Rice's portrayal of vampires, even if the novel version of "Interview with the Vampire" evolved out of a short story she wrote in 1968, as Wikipedia claims.