Final

Many images come to mind when one says the word ‘vampire.’ There are, of course, the horrifying blood-sucking vampires of Eastern European legends, zombies from Africa, modern vampires from Twilight, and of course, vampires that draw from all of these categories, as in Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice. This was a fantastic book, and I highly recommend it to anyone, even if they are not into stories about vampires or the horror genre.

This book is centered on, as the title indicates, an interview with the vampire Louis, who has been around for hundreds of years. I would guess that the modern part of the book is set in the late 20th century. The vampire was born in the 1700’s. The vampire is interviewed by a nameless boy, who is extremely nervous at first about being in a room alone with a creature that could kill him at any time he wanted. Luckily for the boy, this is not Louis’s goal.

The focus of the story is not on the boy and the vampire, but rather the vampire’s experiences that have led up to him being where he is at that point in the story. Namely, how he loses his humanity as time progresses. The vampire commences to tell his story to the boy, who is recording it through a cassette tape player.

Louis started out as a human, just as any other vampire does. He has a nice family (brother, sister, and mother) and a lovely plantation home near New Orleans. Everything is going well until Louis’s brother talks about visions he has had, telling him to sell everything and completely devote his life to God. He dies not too long after, and Louis is an absolute wreck. He wanders around for days, hoping to die. During one of these nights, he is found by a vampire named Lestat, who transforms him.

At first Louis sticks to merely eating animals instead of humans, and he hangs onto his old sadness for his brother and love for Babette Fenrier, the woman in charge of a nearby plantation. He feels just as humans feel and he upholds morals just as most people do. He resented Lestat for not teaching him properly and showing him what sort of an experience one might have during the kill, as opposed to killing mindlessly.

As Lestat and Louis live in New Orleans, Louis comes to realize that he needs to feed on humans in order fully sustain himself. He realizes this, yet he still thinks of himself as evil. One night he feeds upon a small child but leaves her alive. She is later transformed into a vampire and raised by Louis and Lestat, who name her Claudia. She is just as inquisitive as Louis, but she also has no problem killing, just like Lestat. Unfortunately for her, she is eternally stuck in her five-year-old’s body, unable to live completely on her own even if she wants to.

Louis and Claudia have an inseparable bond, beyond that of a father and child, even to the point of being the passion between two lovers. Louis acutely feels this as a human would, but more intensified. Claudia, like most vampires, merely feels a watered-down detached sense of the emotion. For a while, tensions have been building between Lestat and the other two. One night, Claudia follows through on her plan she has been formulating and she kills Lestat. Louis takes the body and dumps it into a swamp far away from the house. Louis was opposed to this killing and tried to talk Claudia out of it, but she was determined.

On the eve of Louis and Claudia’s departure to Paris to find other vampires, they see another vampire outside of their window and they hear the unmistakable footsteps of Lestat on the stairway. Claudia and Louis end up burning the place down while narrowly escaping.

Once the pair arrived in Europe, they decided to take a detour to the heartland of vampire legends- Eastern Europe. What they found were not civilized vampires like themselves, but untamed and horrifying monsters out of the Eastern European legends. They had no minds or anything, just the drive to kill. The trip to Paris is very somber after this horrible experience with other vampires.

While in Paris, Louis is found by another vampire who follows him and the two vampires fight. Eventually another vampire steps in to stop the fight and invites Louis and Claudia to the Théâtre des Vampires. Louis and Claudia attend one of the performances, and Louis acutely feels the pain of the victim that the audience doesn’t seem to realize is actually being fed upon by real vampires. After the show, the vampires all meet and talk. Louis decides that he loves the leader, Armand; Claudia does not like him one bit. The other vampires don’t like the pair. Louis does get to ask some of his most pressing questions that he came to Paris in search of the answers. His biggest questions were: was he was evil, a child of Satan, and does God really exist? Armand answers these as no, and not really. This has a huge impact on Louis, but it doesn’t change things for him too much yet.
Claudia and Louis are growing progressively further apart and colder towards each other. Louis has Armand to talk with and share his company, but Claudia becomes lonely and resentful. Eventually she finds a woman, Madeline, who makes dolls in the image of her deceased daughter who wants nothing more than to be a vampire and take care of Claudia. Louis had said earlier in the story that he absolutely would not turn anyone into a vampire, but he ends up granting Claudia this wish. They may have grown apart, but he still feels her pain and loneliness and an attachment to her.

Everything seems to be going pretty well, when suddenly the vampires of the Théâtre des Vampires storm into their room and take all three away (Louis, Claudia, and Madeline). It turns out that Lestat was still alive, despite of all that he’d been through, albeit greatly changed. He was weak and feeble and ugly, and not his former arrogant self. The other vampires found out that Claudia had attempted to kill Lestat, and in the vampire world, killing one of their own kind was the ultimate crime for which the punishment was death. Louis tries to save her but there is nothing he can do. He is absolutely torn with grief, and not even Armand can fully comfort him. Louis burns down the Théâtre des Vampires, killing all vampires there except Armand. The two go and travel the world together, but they no longer are passionate or long to be with each other. Louis was losing his human side and was becoming detached, like all the other vampires. Louis’s passionate emotions were what Armand most loved about Louis.

The two return to New Orleans, where they live in relative happiness, until Armand realizes that he is having a hard time adapting to the modern world, and he has no desire to continue, and the two vampires part ways. Louis barely feels any emotion about this, just as he felt no emotion when he saw Lestat again, old and feeble, begging him to stay and take care of him. And so the story ends, with Louis cold and emotionless, the complete opposite of what he once was- an immortal human with magnified emotions.

The boy interviewing the vampire (you’ve probably forgotten about him by now) is extremely distraught that the story ended this way, and demands that the vampire change him into a vampire. The boy believes he would live with all of the passion that Louis had at first, but the vampire refuses to change him, though he does drink from the boy to the point of unconsciousness. When the boy awakes, he has a plan- Louis did mention on the tapes where Lestat was currently living, so maybe…