A second interview with the vampire
Interview with the Vampire Teen rating: K (out of 4) Adult rating: The bestselling 1976 horror novel by Anne Rice. A series in which we look back on our first pop-culture loves. In high school, the most exciting phone number I ever received came from a 53-year-old woman with black bangs and a personal style best described as “whimsical funeral:” Anne Rice.
The New Orleans-based supernatural horror author had just taken out an eight-page ad in Daily Variety to gush about the film adaptation of her signature work, Interview With the Vampire, a dramatic flip-flop from her headline-making criticisms of Tom Cruise’s casting as her vampire anti-hero Lestat.
“I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way (Laurence) Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered,” she wrote, in part. Hey, just because she wore a lot of crushed velvet doesn’t make her a psychic.
A newspaper story on her untethered rave included a phone number: 504-522-8634. (The number has since been disconnected.) At 16, my address book included the number for Kool-Aid so that I could periodically request they revive their Berry Blue flavour. Calling Anne Rice was not beneath me.
I was caught off guard when I heard her voice. “Hello.” This easily terrified me more than anything in her bodice-heavingly romantic vampire universe. I realized with some confusion this Anne Rice was a recording.
In a slow, theatrical way, she asked if Interview With the Vampire was not “as much about good as evil . . . light as darkness?” And then a beep abruptly ended the message.
“Um, I’m not sure about good versus evil,” I stammered, grasping for words. “But . . . uh . . . I once had a dream that Lestat was chasing me.”
I hung up in a panic, staring blankly at the shoe-sized cordless phone in my hand.
That was a pretty good answer, wasn’t it? It wasn’t until I told the story at school the next day that I realized it was not a good answer.
I had read Interview With the Vampire in the wake of Rice scandalously dubbing Tom Cruise “no more my vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.” I was hooked on the book before I opened it.
Sixteen is an especially vulnerable age for tales of well-dressed selfloathing vampires wrestling with existentialism.
I steadily clipped through six of the novels before finally slamming The Vampire Armand shut, exhausted by yet another luxuriously described golden candelabra.
When I recently read that Universal was looking at The Vampire Chronicles as its next great franchise hopeful, with Jared Leto in talks to play Lestat in a script adapted from both Interview and its sequel, The Vampire Lestat, I wondered if I had developed the patience for Rice’s ornate-as-a-Catholic-cathedral prose.
Rereading the novel, I found myself enjoying Rice’s painstaking descrip- tions of Louisiana plantations and Parisian catacombs in much the way I enjoy museums: impressed, yet also impatient for their end.
But the characters reminded me why I’d continued to wonder about the other eight (yes eight!) books that completed The Vampire Chronicles.
The tortured Louis, the vampire narrator, was my favourite as a teen and he remains an appealingly angstridden protagonist, torn between his human morality and his destructive vampire desires.
With Louis, Lestat forms a subversive family when he creates Claudia, a 5-year-old child vampire. Her coming-of-age story (that age being about 75) is a thrilling arc, as she matures with a quiet fury into a jaded old soul who is still condescendingly babied by humans a third her age.
Another meaty character arrives with Armand, the 400-year-old vampire who mentors Louis.
His philosophical discussion of why God allows vampires to exist dragged as a teen, but this time I found the discussion of God’s responsibility for evil to be a nobly ambitious theme for a mass paperback that had been marketed as “unrelentingly erotic.”
And while it’s a theme that is explored at an operatic level in Interview With the Vampire, Louis’s tortured quest for meaning gives the book more gravitas than much of the genre, and certainly more than the last vampire novel I read, New Moon by Stephenie Meyer.
So, Anne Rice, I’ve weighed your question as to whether your story is as much about good as it is about evil over the past 22 years and I am ready to agree.
And it’s that goodness, manifested through Louis’s struggle between his own dual natures — guilt-ridden man and impetuously self-indulgent monster — that makes this vampire story so human. Postscript While working on this story, I came across Rice’s email address. It seemed appropriate to reach out to her again. I was thrilled when she responded to reminisce about her fan hotline.
“I remember inviting people to call and many did and I appreciated their comments,” she wrote. “I would often listen to the messages being left by people. It was invaluable.”
If only the real Anne Rice, and not a recording, had answered my call when I was 16.
Louis, the vampire narrator, was my favourite as a teen and he remains an appealingly angst-ridden protagonist