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A review by lesserjoke
The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
3.0
1976's Interview with the Vampire is a modern classic of the gothic horror genre, popularizing a new variety of sympathetic bloodsucker with its brooding and homoerotic immortals. Following in 1985, this first sequel isn't nearly so good, but it still has moments rivaling that baroque majesty of its predecessor while forming an important link to the remainder of the series ahead.
We've switched protagonists to the title figure Lestat, complicated quasi-villain of the original novel, who as a narrator turns out to be more direct and less prone to grandiloquent introspection than Louis. He also contradicts him on several occasions, which reads not as a continuity error so much as a conscious rewriting and emphasis on subjectivity from author Anne Rice. And those tend to be my favorite parts of this book, but they are few and far between, since the point is not simply to retell the events of Interview from a different perspective. Instead, we have a lengthy sequence exploring the (anti)hero's own history, including the unexpected appearance of Armand and the Théâtre des Vampires, along with nested narratives from other fiends relating their respective origins from centuries further back, all the way on to the ancient Egyptian progenitors of this line. In a minor thread bookending the start and end of the text, Lestat picks up a guitar and becomes a contemporary rock idol, angering those of the undead who want their kind to stay in the shadows forever.
It's a bit all over the place, in other words, and Rice seems particularly enthralled with the explanatory mythology she's concocted, which was largely absent in the previous volume. Future sagas of this ilk and installments of this one would balance plot and worldbuilding concerns more skillfully, but the writer's groundbreaking contribution here is to think through the latter so completely at all. To some extent that makes this little beyond a just-so story for the setting, but it also transitions the action into the high-stakes pulpy thriller mode that subsequent releases like The Queen of the Damned and The Tale of the Body Thief would continue to utilize. I sped through many of those when I was younger, but on this reread, I think I might just bid farewell now after this two-part debut.
[Content warning for gore, incest, slavery, pedophilia, and rape.]
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We've switched protagonists to the title figure Lestat, complicated quasi-villain of the original novel, who as a narrator turns out to be more direct and less prone to grandiloquent introspection than Louis. He also contradicts him on several occasions, which reads not as a continuity error so much as a conscious rewriting and emphasis on subjectivity from author Anne Rice. And those tend to be my favorite parts of this book, but they are few and far between, since the point is not simply to retell the events of Interview from a different perspective. Instead, we have a lengthy sequence exploring the (anti)hero's own history, including the unexpected appearance of Armand and the Théâtre des Vampires, along with nested narratives from other fiends relating their respective origins from centuries further back, all the way on to the ancient Egyptian progenitors of this line. In a minor thread bookending the start and end of the text, Lestat picks up a guitar and becomes a contemporary rock idol, angering those of the undead who want their kind to stay in the shadows forever.
It's a bit all over the place, in other words, and Rice seems particularly enthralled with the explanatory mythology she's concocted, which was largely absent in the previous volume. Future sagas of this ilk and installments of this one would balance plot and worldbuilding concerns more skillfully, but the writer's groundbreaking contribution here is to think through the latter so completely at all. To some extent that makes this little beyond a just-so story for the setting, but it also transitions the action into the high-stakes pulpy thriller mode that subsequent releases like The Queen of the Damned and The Tale of the Body Thief would continue to utilize. I sped through many of those when I was younger, but on this reread, I think I might just bid farewell now after this two-part debut.
[Content warning for gore, incest, slavery, pedophilia, and rape.]
Like this review?
--Throw me a quick one-time donation here!
https://ko-fi.com/lesserjoke
--Subscribe here to support my writing and weigh in on what I read next!
https://patreon.com/lesserjoke
--Follow along on Goodreads here!
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6288479-joe-kessler
--Or click here to browse through all my previous reviews!
https://lesserjoke.home.blog