Interview With a Vampire
"Louis, Louis, Louis. Still whining after all these years."
That quote isn't actually from the book. It's Lestat's final line in the 1994 movie adaptation. But, damn, is it an appropriate summation of this book.
Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire was a genre changer. It was the first mainstream media that took a sympathetic view towards vampires. They're just lonely immortals at the top of the food chain who spend their free time reading poetry, visiting the opera, and looking for other vampires to share eternity with. Not all the different from you or me.
This also introduced a dynamic that has been repeated in vampire literature ever since. We get Louis, the brooding brunette who doesn't want to kill people; Lestat, the partying blonde who's just out to have a good time and who cares about the body count; and Claudia, the super special girl that they're both obsessed with. This dynamic has gotten a ton of mileage from Buffy (Angel/Spike/Drusilla and later Angel/Spike/Buffy) to True Blood (Bill/Eric/Sookie) to The Vampire Diaries (Stefan/Damon/Katherine and Stefan/Damon/Elena). To be fair, The Vampire Diaries switched the hair colors. But Anne Rice certainly tapped into something powerful when she created her trio of immortal bloodsuckers.
Unfortunately, this story is told from the point of view of Louis, who is the least interesting vampire in the mix. He's always brooding about morality and his inherent evilness. He spends way too long describing how incredible the world looks with his new vampire senses. At one point he goes off on a six-page tangent about a hallucination he had of Lestat in a church while I banged my head against a wall waiting for him to get on with it.
I'll be honest, I skipped entire passages because they weren't relevant to the plot in any way.
The story itself is interesting, if incredibly drawn out. I like Lestat's decision to turn Claudia and her growing hatred of him and the situation he stuck her in. I like the strange homo-eroticism of the scenes with Louis and Armand. I like Lestat's complete unraveling when Louis leaves him.
I just wish the narrator were a bit more interesting and less prone to descriptive tangents.
That quote isn't actually from the book. It's Lestat's final line in the 1994 movie adaptation. But, damn, is it an appropriate summation of this book.
Anne Rice's Interview With a Vampire was a genre changer. It was the first mainstream media that took a sympathetic view towards vampires. They're just lonely immortals at the top of the food chain who spend their free time reading poetry, visiting the opera, and looking for other vampires to share eternity with. Not all the different from you or me.
This also introduced a dynamic that has been repeated in vampire literature ever since. We get Louis, the brooding brunette who doesn't want to kill people; Lestat, the partying blonde who's just out to have a good time and who cares about the body count; and Claudia, the super special girl that they're both obsessed with. This dynamic has gotten a ton of mileage from Buffy (Angel/Spike/Drusilla and later Angel/Spike/Buffy) to True Blood (Bill/Eric/Sookie) to The Vampire Diaries (Stefan/Damon/Katherine and Stefan/Damon/Elena). To be fair, The Vampire Diaries switched the hair colors. But Anne Rice certainly tapped into something powerful when she created her trio of immortal bloodsuckers.
Unfortunately, this story is told from the point of view of Louis, who is the least interesting vampire in the mix. He's always brooding about morality and his inherent evilness. He spends way too long describing how incredible the world looks with his new vampire senses. At one point he goes off on a six-page tangent about a hallucination he had of Lestat in a church while I banged my head against a wall waiting for him to get on with it.
I'll be honest, I skipped entire passages because they weren't relevant to the plot in any way.
The story itself is interesting, if incredibly drawn out. I like Lestat's decision to turn Claudia and her growing hatred of him and the situation he stuck her in. I like the strange homo-eroticism of the scenes with Louis and Armand. I like Lestat's complete unraveling when Louis leaves him.
I just wish the narrator were a bit more interesting and less prone to descriptive tangents.
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