Interview with the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles)

Sometimes a book comes along that pulls you in, and takes you far away from what you know, opening doors to other worlds and a life you had never dreamed of. A book that will haunt you for the rest of your life 'Interview With The Vampire' is one of those novels, like Wuthering Heights, Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, that sweeps you away in it's twists and turns challenging ones psyche with it's soaring breadth of incredible storytelling and imagination. Well, I will tell you, this novel is right at home with these classics. As I read this novel the main story blazed like a great flame and magically lit my imagination and memory leaving an indelible and endearing mark . "Anne Rice's indomitable spirit shines and here you see how her intricate descriptions and talent of invoking deep emotions could fuel a literary career of legendary proportion." In this story Louis relates a tale of his reluctant immortality, a morose and emotionally frail man who has suffered great loss. Taken over by a force a charisma embodied in the likes of the vampire Lestat, a vain, selfish, sadistic, and 'even' *gasp* ..sardonic individual driven by his mercurial and unbridled whims. This book transformed the typical sinister vampire of mysterious gloom and doom into a wild byronic character full of philosophy and ideas, topped with a stylish and dramatic flair. An entrepreneur of acquiring property and means of great wealth. Never mind the old dark and dank castles of old, these immortals live in the lap of luxury in every way. Lestat ,you see, though not the main character somehow seems to dominate the narrative and oddly Lestat has forever seemed to be present in the chronicles even when he is not. I believe he is one of the greatest literary characters of our time and is forever entertaining in his adventures good and bad. In the tale we are transported to New Orleans 200 years ago. In Anne's words gabled houses come to life and you feel as if the tension is real. You can practically hear the crickets chirping in the night and feel the sensation, the desperation Louis conveys. There is a kind of preternatural longing in the progression of the events. Events addressing deep seated subjects that we have at one time or another felt in our psyche and maybe could not articulate? What I found most interesting is this novels structure. It is quite different from any I have ever read. On contemplating this I realized there are passages in 'Interview' that are very like our deep unconscious dreams, so real and full of odd circumstances you wake remembering the whole but then small fragments come back during the day. There are so many odd occurrences a doll shop, a tower, a subterranean lair, Armand scaling a tower with Louis, fighting monstrous creatures, along with surprising and terrible incidences that fill the whole. There is the main events that shift and change place but will end up uniting in a surprising way. I think it would not be too far fetched to compare this work to a surrealist painting such as Dali. You have the basis of a regular painting. When viewing his work it draws you in, you start to realize a clock is not just a clock it is melting on the landscape in which it lay and is quite altered and with a title like 'Persistence of Memory' the painting stirs the imagination to no end. Here in IWTV you have man transformed to something unnatural a creature seeking comfort and there are relationships but they are severely altered by the vampiric natures of these individuals. The whole question of death and our existence is challenged and begs for conversation on the subject of immortality. Claudia is a lovely young girl eternally trapped in a childs body and the limitations of her stature brings terrible frustration. Those who fall for her compulsive charms are usually teetering on the threshold of doom. Louis is repulsed by his need to kill and tries in vain to fight it with alternatives. His relationships crumble and his inner drive to survive propels him forward. Torn by his desire to love and his circumstantial and inner fluctuating need for independence. One of the greatest inventions that I feel seals this story into immortality is the blending of Theatre and Vampirism. The reality of the vampiric condition is portrayed in a theatrical production luring a mortal audience into an entertainment that is a true twist of the ordinary suspension of disbelief. In Interview Anne Rice raises a production that envelopes you in layers of atmosphere and longing. Many authors draw from deep pain and here Anne Rice transformed hers into a masterpiece. This book prompted me to attend the 'Anne Rice Vampire Lestat Ball'. Check it out @ http://www.arvlfc.com I was amazed at the people who loved her work. It was incredible to walk the streets of New Orleans and get a feel for what she was talking about. 'Interview With a Vampire' opened up a world I never knew. Her presence on Facebook and Amazon has taught me so much about her process and the art of writing and for this I am forever grateful. This year is a banner year for Anne Rice fans in that there is a new book arriving called 'Prince Lestat.' I highly recommend attending the ball if not this year then next. You will most likely see Anne Rice there and see the place where it all began. Did I fail to mention.... I love this book!

Yeah, this one's still a barn-burner of a page-turner and a half. As a work of influential Gothic horror literature (and it's certainly a horror novel), it's fascinating to revisit, as its own object, a text that stands in stark contrast to how it's come to live in the collective memory, in relation to adaptations/Rice's own ret-cons in how she later developed her vampire mythos/what evolved/devolved out of its genre influence/etc. Hits differently for sure, profoundly more bleak, psychologically disturbing, and all around more harrowing than I remembered it from the last time I read it over twenty years ago. Much like the interviewer's response at the end, every "paranormal romance" vampire novel since somehow both missed the point yet is all too understandable/relatable. Don't call this a "paranormal romance", for Louis and Lestat (the original L&L, as we meet them here) are many things, but a "love story" they ain't! And literally everything to do with Claudia is especially skin-crawly. Rice once said of it, "It's not just about vampires. It's about us." She was right, and that's not something to take comfort in.

My first encounter with Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire was in the early 1990s when a grade school girl friend had purchased a paperback copy at a yard sale for fifty cents. I remember her clutching it to her chest and kicking her feet in the air while lying on her bed as she exclaimed, "I am in love with this book!" I did not follow her advice and read it for myself. But in 1994, much to the hype of its two leading actors, I was fascinated by the film adaptation which was released while I was working my first job in a movie theater. Six years later I was working in a bookstore and regularly listening to the hype of other vampire fans who lusted after every new book in the Chronicles series. I finally picked up The Witching Hour after being encouraged by a close friend but I put it down before finishing it because I just didn't feel like I was a mature enough reader at the time to enjoy it the way it was intended. But I was turned on to Anne's son and his writing that year after I attended a book signing for his first book, Density of Souls. Now, another 12 years later, I finally decided to read his mother. After reading Anne's latest, The Wolf Gift, just a few weeks ago and being well pleased with it, I decided it was finally time to give her vampires a try. I'd been collecting her books in hardcover with intention to read them at some point and my copy of Interview is a 1976 hardcover 1st edition. It's hard to believe this book came out the year I was born. It definitely reads like a timeless classic and holds its appeal still today. As long as readers are fascinated by vampires, I'm sure Interview will be in print and continue to sell. I was also surprised by how well the book was adapted to film, but that is to be expected since, to my knowledge, Anne did work on the script. My main problem was that it's almost impossible not to picture Tom Cruise as Lestat or Brad Pitt as Louis while reading it. Surprisingly, Kirsten Dunst did not pop into my head as much for Claudia. And I tried desperately to keep Antonio out of my head as Armand since he was my least favorite actor in the movie. I also enjoyed the minor plot lines that were in the book, but not in the movie - the biggest being the presence of Lestat's human father in the beginning of the book. Even though it's one of the shortest books in the Vampire Chronicles, it is definitely not a light read. At 309 pages, it took me just over 2 weeks to read it. Rice is extremely poetic and does tend to over romanticize descriptions. Heavy descriptions of ornate clothing, furnishings, and New Orleans settings really dragged the narrative for me at times, though Rice definitely knows how to paint a picture for her readers. That being said, you do get a definite sense of Louis's struggle (both physical and emotional) with being a vampire. You are in his head 100% even though he's telling the story; his emotional turmoil with who he is and the debate of good and evil is prevalent. But it is often Lestat's pride and acceptance of what he is that drives the book, despite how much Louis despises him. I'm definitely looking forward to the next book in the series which focuses entirely on Lestat. Though this book wasn't completely my forte, I do have an appreciation and admiration for it just because it really did define the genre that we know today. While vampires have become more monstrous and much more accepting of what and who they are, perhaps in a way they all stemmed from the beautiful lost Louie or boastful Lestat.

In this book, Anne Rice tells a flashback story, until the last scene. Throughout the book, there is an interviewer called the boy who tapes the interview and there is Louis the vampire who is telling the boy about his experiences up to the point where he is talking to the boy, which means there exists in the novel a frame story and a core story. The frame story consists of the interviewer and Louis. The core story talks about Louis’s adventures and relationships. The setting, in the beginning, is the late twentieth century San Francisco. Before that, it is Pointe du Lac, a plantation in Lousiana, New Orleans, and Paris, France. The protagonist in the core story is Louis, a vampire of about two centuries, and the antagonist is Lestat who turned Louis into a vampire. The secondary characters are Claudia and Armand, with Claudia’s role being much greater than Armand’s. Claudia attracted Louis first, then she was made into a vampire by Lestat possibly to keep Louis with him. I found the relationships among the characters to be the most interesting in the story rather than the events of the story, in which the action never stops. The tension and suspense in the book are also fascinating as does the writing style, and even if the events seem to be far out, the skill of the author adds a believability factor to unbelievable circumstances. Both Louis and Claudia have mixed feelings about Lestat, and they take some kind of revenge from him, which ends up giving Louis guilt feelings. Lestat, on the other hand, loves them but as a vampire, he is selfish but much more knowledgeable. Then there are the strong love and hate relationships between any two or more vampires, which was interesting, like that of Lestat and Louis, Louis and Armand, and Armand and Santiago and the other vampires. The relationship between Louis and Claudia had more love than any other relationship in the story. These relationships had nothing to do with gender or sex but possibly their type of attraction was due to who these vampires were. As characterization is superior to the horror elements in the novel, I didn’t think Lestat to be a villain at all. He was a vampire who knew what was there to know about the vampire lore, but wasn’t willing to share it fully, only because he wanted to keep those he was attached to close to him. He was selfish that way. Also, that he didn’t go after vengeance after what Claudia and Louis did to him elevated the way I thought of him. Then both Louis and Lestat love all arts and spend time in the opera or at the art museum and all vampires have intensely alert senses to shapes, colors, sounds, and smells. In fact, all these details and their peculiar richness make this book very readable. I don’t normally read horror, but I must have read this book much earlier possibly during the late seventies, as I recalled much of it while reading it the second time this October, and I am not sorry for it. Truth is, I enjoyed it greatly.

Maybe I just don't get it, but this novel didn't do anything for me. The storyline was fairly interesting, but not superb. The characters were well-developed: overdeveloped, even, in that Rice repeated their flaws. Reading, I felt as if I was being continuously bludgeoened with heavy-handed grandiose drippings of love and eternity and loneliness. This context was set tens of times throughout the novel, rather than - as I would have found preferential - set once, with the plot/storyline to develop off of it. It seems as if the human population is decisively split between Rice fans, and Rice haters. Her writing can be tedious, at times, but is never difficult to read. About half-way through, one will feel inclined to seriously question as to whether any aspects of the book will change, or if the characters - at this point, Louis and Claudia - will simply continue on their well-worn path of searching for other Vampires and endless self-speculation and introspection. This book is not without its merits: It deals with a fascinating subject matter that has romanticised mythology and spawned a film and novel genre. However, in all, I found this novel lackluster and overall uninteresting. Interview with the Vampire is worth reading if only for its place in the 'horror' canon, but not for the actual quality of the work. It exists as the seminal piece of fiction within this genre, however I may disagree with that, it should be acknowledged as such.

I read this book when she first wrote it. I bought a paperback copy on a rack in gas station while on a trip! That copy had three sickly pale individuals who were our main characters looking like Vampires. I gobbled the book up and told my then husband that this was the greatest horror book ever written. I went on to read the rest. I also read the Witching Hour series. My daughter read those also and now I have an adult granddaughter named Rowan because my daughter fell in love with that name. She is now 49! Anne Rice is brilliant and vampires are still my favorite topic of reading.

This is a gorgeous edition of this amazing novel. I am so happy that I have it in my collection.

This was my first time reading Interview with the Vampire after watching the TV series, and I absolutely loved it. The characters are deep and engaging, and the storytelling is rich and immersive. It hooked me right from the beginning, and the pacing is perfect for getting lost in the world of vampires. Some sections move a little slower, but they build atmosphere beautifully. I didn’t like Louis as much as I did in the series — he comes across as a bit whiny in parts — but I wish I’d read the book first. I think I would have understood him better from the start. I was sick in bed and ended up finishing it the day after I got it. I can’t wait to start the next one, and I fully intend to read the entire Vampire Chronicles series. Highly recommended for fans of vampire stories, gothic fiction, and emotional, character-driven tales.

Ótimo, prático e leve, veio um pouquinho machucado mas nem é relevante pra mim

Glad to have this book that started the whole thing came in perfect condition

Arrivato in ottime condizioni

Great book and great shipment! Although there are no chapters in this book, the suspense is great and the plot well contructed.