Interview with The Vampire has been on my read list for a while. Actually, I’ve been interested in exploring the history of vampires a bit more deeply once I realized that the three original vampire novels (The Vampyre, Carmilla, and Dracula) are all super queer. Interview with the Vampire represented a shift in how modern vampires were written. Rice placed them at the center of the tale instead of as an antagonist to be vanquished. As with its predecessors, it’s also super queer-coded. I think I came into the novel with incorrect assumptions about what this book would be, which led to this being a more disappointing read than I was hoping for. In the end I enjoyed it, but I wish discussion about the book was more accurate to the reading experience.
Read If Looking For: musings on the nature of immortality, immoral protagonists, interesting monologues
Avoid If Looking For: two gay-coded dads raising their vampiric daughter together, main characters who didn’t own slaves, traditional plot structures
Elevator Pitch:
Louis is a vampire who has agreed to sit down for an interview. In it, he describes the story of his creation in New Orleans at the hands of the vampire Lestat, the creation of his daughter Claudia, and his flight away from his cruel creator. In his journey he grapples with what it means to take a life, to be a good person, to never die.
What Didn’t Work For Me:
I think a lot of my dislike for this story came from how it’s been pitched to me. I came expecting to see two vampires coparenting (and all the complications that come with raising a new vampire) while also living in a state of homoerotic tension. I’d been prepared for classic ‘living together but totally not gay vibes common in older queer novels. The book … wasn’t that.
To begin with, Lestat is not particularly likeable. Yes, he’s a vampire and doesn’t feel anything about killing people. However, he’s also just a bad person to live with. Cruel, uncaring, and willing to toss aside things that aren’t useful to him. This isn’t necessarily a bad characteristic for a major character, but I kept wondering ‘when will these two characters start to enjoy each others company?’ The story never really got there; Louis and Claudia spend a good chunk of the story running away from Lestat. Claudia herself didn’t need much parenting, and the bits that happened were brushed over very quickly. Again, this isn’t a bad thing in isolation, but there was a lot of me adjusting my expectations on where the story was going.
I haven’t watched the TV show, but after reading the book, it seems like they made some good shifts in terms of how race is treated. In the book, Louis is a plantation owner. It’s notable that he feels nothing for the treatment of his slaves yet has profound guilt whenever he feeds on humans, including his slaves. I don’t know that this is an inaccurate view of slaveowners, but Rice certainly made a choice here to take the story in that direction. The slaves in the novel do catch onto Louis and Lestat’s secrets before anyone else did, but generally lacked agency and characterization. They mostly existed to be killed off or run away from when they talked uprising. They felt a bit like a set piece instead of characters to be treated as fleshed out individuals like the white side characters were written. In the end, this book is asking you to empathize with a slave owner who never goes through any moral growth around that choice despite the novel centering Louis’s grappling with the ethics of immortality and vampirism. To a certain extent, I thought it undercut a lot of that later development.
What Worked for Me:
Once I let go of my preconceived notions, there was a lot about Interview with the Vampire to love. Louis’ exposure to many different approaches to vampirism was fascinating, especially since he perceives himself as a consistent outcast who doesn’t fit in with the ideals of other vampires. Louis isn’t the only one grappling with immortality either; in the later part of the book he has a chat with the oldest living vampire – that we know about at the time – who discusses how most vampires can’t handle the relentless change of society around them and lose the will to live. There’s a lot of prompting self-reflection in the reader happening throughout the story, and I think Rice gets it right most often when she considers how characters who face eternal life shift irrevocably. It doesn’t work quite as well as an interrogation of a person’s guilt at killing humans to survive.
As for queer tension, there were a lot of fun moments. One of my favorites was shortly after Louis was turned into a vampire. Lestat tells him to sleep in the coffin with him until they get a custom one made for Louis. The response? Louis would rather go sleep in the closet thank you very much. I couldn’t stop laughing at how on the nose it was, but I truly don’t think Rice intended that moment to be read as queer subtext. While the original vampire stories were more explicitly queer (and written by likely queer authors), Interview With the Vampire seems a bit more constrained in its approach. I think it’s entirely possible to read Lestat and Louis as not romantically involved; I certainly wouldn’t have without previous knowledge of the books. However, Louis later professes his undying love to a different male vampire in the book, so the story doesn’t present him as straight either.
Conclusion: I came for homoerotic vampire dads, left with a fear of being immortal
Marked for Plot 