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.
