The Vampire Lestat

The Vampire Lestat is Anne Rice’s answer to her own first novel. In Interview with the Vampire, Louis spent three hundred pages explaining what Lestat had done to him. Here, Lestat tells his own story — and he is having none of Louis’s tragic self-presentation.

Where Louis is mournful, Lestat is exhilarated. Where Louis searches for meaning, Lestat insists there is none and finds the fact liberating rather than crushing. Rice gives him a narrative voice of startling confidence: he knows he is vain, shallow, and morally indefensible, and he considers this interesting rather than shameful. It is a risk that works completely.

The novel begins with Lestat waking in the twentieth century, having gone into the earth centuries earlier after his maker Magnus destroyed himself. The world has changed; he wants in. He becomes a rock star, writes his autobiography, and deliberately provokes the vampire world by making its secrets public. This framing — the vampire memoir as cultural spectacle — is Rice’s most formally inventive gesture.

The autobiography-within-autobiography structure takes us back to 18th-century France: the seventh son of a penniless Auvergnat marquis, bored senseless by poverty and provincial life, who runs away to Paris with an actor friend. Rice is wonderful on the period: the philosophical air of pre-revolutionary Paris, the excitement of Enlightenment ideas, the particular texture of aristocratic decline. Lestat’s transformation by Magnus — a wild-eyed, ancient vampire who destroys himself immediately after — is one of the strangest and most uncanny scenes in the series.

The novel also expands the mythology significantly. We meet Armand, the ancient vampire ruler of Les Théâtres des Vampires in Paris, who appears briefly in Interview with the Vampire as the leader who sentences Claudia to death. Here we get his history — Roman, Renaissance Venetian, eventually Parisian — and understand how ancient the world Lestat is navigating actually is. We glimpse Marius, the painter vampire who has been keeping Akasha and Enkil, the progenitors, entombed for centuries. The mythology deepens in ways that will pay off in Queen of the Damned.

For readers coming directly from Interview with the Vampire, the tonal shift is significant. Louis gave you interiority; Lestat gives you spectacle. Neither is right about what the vampire life means. That tension is what makes the first three novels, read together, one of the most complete artistic achievements in popular Gothic fiction.