Interview with the Vampire
British Fantasy Award nominee 1977.
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 vulnerablestrangers 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 literary imagination of the first order.
Anne Rice
Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien; 1941–2021) was an American author of gothic fiction, Christian literature, and erotic literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. Books from The Vampire Chronicles were the subject of two film adaptations - Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Queen of the Damned (2002).
Born in New Orleans, Rice spent much of her early life there before moving to Texas, and later to San Francisco. She was raised in an observant Catholic family but became an agnostic as a young adult. She began her professional writing career with the publication of Interview with the Vampire in 1976, while living in California, and began writing sequels to the novel in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, following a publicized return to Catholicism, Rice published the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, fictionalized accounts of certain incidents in the life of Jesus. Several years later she distanced herself from organized Christianity, citing disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church's stances on social issues but pledging that faith in God remained "central to [her] life." However, she later considered herself a secular humanist.
The Vampire Chronicles
The Vampire Chronicles consists of thirteen books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
Related series New Tales of the Vampires
Book Reviews
Interview with the Vampire is the first book of The Vampire Chronicles, which is a great horror and dark fantasy series (especially the first three books are good and worth reading; The Tale of the Body Thief is readable, but Memnoch the Devil is a bit weak). I enjoyed reading this book and I can highly recommend it to readers, who want to read interesting horror and dark fantasy stories. Interview with the Vampire is in a league of its own. You can forget all the other vampire books by other writers. This is the only vampire book that you should read. If you like this book, you should read the other parts too.