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Interview with The Vampire by Anne Rice


“A tale that could have been mesmerizing if it wasn’t so mired down in Louis’ self-hatred and the general lack of any redeeming quality in any of the other characters.”
2 Stars
Pros: Rice gives an interesting view of the Vampire mythos, what can and cannot harm them etc/The description of their heightened senses was interesting. 
Cons: Not one character seemed to have anything redeeming about them, except for Louis and his stubborn hold on his “humanity” but that also gave rise to his utter self-loathing which became absolutely insufferable/How the characters just fell in love so easily, there was really no reason for it, no real backstory, it was all just a little unsettling and weird.

Full Review
Louis is already the owner of a prosperous plantation in New Orleans when he is turned into a Vampire by the mysterious Lestat. Lestat’s reason for this is that he wants Louis’ plantation and so he more or less, gets what he wants. Louis struggles with the idea of being a Vampire, wondering if what he is, is truly evil. If the fact that he must drink blood, human or animal in order to sustain himself, is a sin in and of itself. He constantly struggles with this concept, with the idea that he is evil, though he does not wish to be. But the other characters in the novel, Lestat, Claudia, Armand, they seem to have no compunction whatsoever about the fact that they must kill to survive.

Louis seems to be the only one with a conscience in the entire narrative. And that conscience becomes so overwhelmingly self-loathing that by the end of the book, I was glad to be done with it. His constant questioning and struggle with his “humanity” gets extremely tiresome after awhile and the fact that he never really gets answers to his questions because all the other characters are so wrapped up in themselves, leaves the reader frustrated and annoyed.

As he struggles in his attempt to become a Vampire, he feeds from a small girl who is crying over the dead body of her Mother. He almost kills her, but Lestat intervenes, only to then bring him back to where the small girl is being kept in a hospital, so that he and Louis may finish the process and turn the girl into a Vampire. This is Claudia. Her body will never mature. She will always be trapped at the age that she was when she was turned, which is perhaps 7, but her mind matures. She becomes obsessed with finding out more about Vampires, about whether there are others like them in the world and her anger at Lestat and Louis for turning her into an immortal doll is one of the driving points of the narrative.

In their search to find other Vampires, it brings them from New Orleans, to the Carpathian Mountains, to the Mediterranean and then onto Paris, where they meet a group of Vampire led by Armand who own a Theater wherein they are Vampires, pretending to be humans, pretending to be vampires. It’s all…very confusing and it just adds more fuel to the fire of Louis’ constant struggle and questioning of whether he is evil because of what he is, what he was turned into. If these people at the Theaters de Vampires can so easily kill, and all for the sake of entertainment, then how in the world can he live with himself? But he meets an understanding soul in the form of Armand, the “leader” of this group of Vampires. But none of Louis’s questions are answered.

They learn more about what they are and the rules that Lestat neglected to teach them and this is turn has disastrous consequences. I found myself finishing the book quickly because it, for once, had pace and plot and action. It wasn’t just a 20 page diatribe about how beautiful the world was with Louis’ heightened vampire senses and how much he hated himself because he needed to kill in order to survive.

I was honestly glad to be done with the book by the time it was finished and though the ending leaves it open for more books, I may, read more of the series but I won’t be spending any money on them. That’s what the Library is for.

I would recommend this book to people interested in Vampires and authors take on the Mythos but other than that, it was a fluffy, drawn out, waste of my time and I’m glad to be done with it.

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