5.05.2011
Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice, 340 pgs, hardcover
Overall Grade: B
Series: The Vampire Chronicles book 1
Gay vampires.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the novel in two words.
Louis is a young landowner in 18th-century Louisiana when he encounters the vampire Lestat, who has materialistic eyes set on using Louis' wealth and estate to support himself. So he turns Louis into a vampire. For a long time, Louis and Lestat are the only two vampires, and they love and hate each other. After burning Louis' house to the ground, they move to New Orleans, and Lestat plays even more mind games with Louis by creating a vampire out of a little girl, thus making them "a family". They live a decadent, vampiric lifestyle for many decades in New Orleans, till Claudia (the girl vampire) grows up mentally (if not physically) and decides to off Lestat for being a horrible, manipulative, selfish prick. Louis & Claudia then travel to Eastern Europe in Claudia's quest to find more vampires, because everyone knows that all the vampire stories start there. They find vampires alright, just not like they'd expected. Finally, they go to Paris, hoping to find more aristocratic, civilized vampires like themselves. They meet Armand and his group of theatrical vampires. Other vampires are turned off by Louis' vestigial morality and Claudia's lack of qualms about killing other vampires. Lestat returns. Armand explains why there aren't any really REALLY old vampires (judging by the later books, he's wrong.) More vampire death. Fast forward to the present day (1970s) where Louis is sitting in a dark hotel room in San Francisco, monologuing to a boyish reporter, which is how the whole story is narrated = annoying as all get out.
The prose style isn't bad, and the story is actually interesting at times. But I really really hope Rice adds more plot to the next books. Because I don't think I could read an entire series of gentile vampire playing mind games with each other and having quasi-relationships which aren't actually sexual but still cause them to obsess over each other, or as my brother summed it up "gay".
Labels: genre: fantasy, genre: fiction, genre: historical, media: book, series: Vampire Chronicles
