Interview with a Vampire

Interview with a Vampire. The title is pretty self explanatory. I found it at first, as boring as it sounded, but as I read I started to get more and more involved. It could have been the interesting male on male action (no hard stuff here, just some light touches and steamy descriptions). Or maybe it was the characters? Regardless, it was a great read, my favorite in the list so far.

I never really enjoyed vampire novels or stories, but I really love the way that Rice presents them. All the cross, holy water, wooden stick in the chest stuff was getting old, and Rice did a great job making a "new" vampire. In fact, sometimes I started to wonder how similar her vampire was to the twilight vampire. Come to think of it I bet I could really make an argument that Edward is Louis from the interview series. They are both depressed enough.

There seemed to me to be a lot of "searching" in this book. In fact, I'd like to argue that the book had lots of these "searching" themes, a leit motif, if you will. Louis and Claudia search for "others" and for the knowledge they posses. In fact, the "knowledge" they seek is a mere illusion, a lie I suspect, that Lestat comes up with to keep Claudia and Louis around. Though, it still didn't save him from being "killed" numerous times. The "old world" vampires also offer no such "knowledge" and this search ultimately ends up with the destruction of Louis's last human impulse and care, when Claudia and Madeleine are killed by sun light, and Louis is kept alive by Armand.

There seemed to me to be a great deal of homosexuality in this book. Though, it was very sub-par, and not touched on a great deal. Rice's vampires have no need for sexual encounters, nor do they know the human emotion. I think this is why Louis was so fascinating to Armand, since Louis did "feel" for the humans he killed, unlike most vampires. It was also interesting to me that both Louis and Lestat never really traveled with an adult female. This also added to the small hints of homosexuality, even when Lestat and Louis do have a female companion (Claudia) she is a small child. When she and Lestat are out of the picture Louis turns to Armand, and they travel a little while together, but Louis never gets over Claudia and ends up finding out that immortality is best lived alone. Claudia was the thing that kept him "going", it kept him "attached" to his human ways and to his new immortal life, one that he slips away from when she's gone. He turns into a wanderer of sorts, no longer attached to anything.

One thing about Rice's vampires that struck me as interesting was that they were not these powerful things that ravaged the land and were known and feared by the villagers, but that they were more narcissistic new-age characters. Louis was this self-loathing thing, who brooded over the lives he took. If anything this was a coming-of-age story vampire style. A lose of "innocence". Throughout the book, we see Louis born into vampire-ism, and his growing into it. He slowly learns that he really is no longer human, he is dead. He learns to love blood, to enjoy it, and slowly loses his human innocence and guilt. He becomes an "adult" vampire as he learns throughout the book.

I really enjoyed this book and will look more into the series.