Interview with the Vampire, debut novel by American Gothic fiction author Anne Rice, published in 1976. She was the first writer of popular fiction who created vampires who could be related to and who were protagonists in their story. Though not all critics appreciated Interview with the Vampire, it proved to be popular enough to lead to a 12-book series collectively called The Vampire Chronicles. Interview with the Vampire was made into a well-received movie in 1994.
Across these books, Rice substantially reworked the ancient legends of the vampire into a more modern mold. Her vampires take on many of the qualities of Dracula, but she portrays a more eroticized and more violent world than that created by Bram Stoker, one that is brought up to date and located not in Transylvania but in in her hometown of New Orleans.
The central figure of Interview with the Vampire is Louis, who has been a vampire for for almost 200 years and is gifted, or cursed, with immortal life. As he tells his story to an unnamed interviewer, we begin to understand what such a life might be like. Vampires see the world through different senses—their world is at once more brutal and yet more startlingly vivid than it can ever be to mere human perception.
Louis’s story begins on his plantation near New Orleans in 1791, when he agrees to allow a vampire, Lestat, to change him into a vampire and to permit Lestat to live with him. However, Louis feels that feeding off humans is evil, in contrast to Lestat, and he is frustrated by Lestat’s unwillingness to teach him the history and culture of vampires. Eventually, the enslaved workers on the plantation become aware of the evil nature of Louis and Lestat, who respond by burning the plantation down and moving into New Orleans.
The move does nothing to improve Louis’s feelings toward Lestat, and Lestat turns a five-year-old orphaned girl, Claudia, into a vampire to stop Louis from leaving him. Though Claudia’s mind grows up, her body remains that of a little girl, and she comes to hate Lestat for causing this. She and Louis are very close, however. Eventually, Claudia devises a plan that she believes will kill Lestat, and she and Louis put the plan into action. They flee to eastern Europe in hopes of learning more about vampires.
The vampires that Louis and Claudia find in eastern Europe are mindless creatures seeking only to feed. Disappointed, they move to Paris, where they meet a 400-year-old vampire, Armand, who leads a group of vampires in the Théâtre des Vampires. Claudia finds the deepening relationship between Louis and Armand to be threatening, and she insists that Louis turn Madeleine, a doll maker who imagines that Claudia can replace her deceased daughter, into a vampire. Soon, Lestat, who survived, arrives in Paris and reveals that Louis and Claudia tried to kill him. Among vampires, killing one’s maker is punishable by death. The vampires seize Louis, Claudia, and Madeleine. Armand frees Louis, but Claudia and Madeleine are killed. In revenge, Louis burns down the Théâtre des Vampires. Louis and Armand escape together, but Louis becomes indifferent toward Armand, and he returns to New Orleans to find Lestat. As Louis finishes telling his story, the interviewer, to his horror, asks to be turned into a vampire.
Anne Rice herself wrote the screenplay for the 1994 movie version of Interview with the Vampire, directed with lush, decadent style by Neil Jordan and starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Antonio Banderas.
It is a measure of the strength of the book that this improbable situation never veers into being mawkish or sentimental; the reader is brought to understand how Louis experiences both the terrors and the attractions of being an outcast, not only from humankind but also to a large extent from the other vampires who are, perforce, his only kind.
Permeating this dilemma are the bright lights and shadows of New Orleans, a city at once ancient and modern, broodingly pagan and showily contemporary. In Interview with the Vampire, we find ourselves immersed in a nighttime world that sometimes seems to be the negative image of the world we perceive through our limited human senses.