A review by jarvvis
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

During my years as a Poppy Z. Brite devotee, I always felt a smidge of guilt at having never finished IWTV, and now that I’ve fallen in love with the show, I figured it was time to give it another shot.

The good:
- A cornerstone of vampire literature. Spawned one of the greatest television experiences of my life.

- A bit of a good, a bit of a bad: the immeasurable grief this is infused with, the emotion that defines Louis more than anything else. It hampers the story slightly, when it is told by the world’s saddest man, but it is also this book’s emotional core and the whole reason it was written. It’s the thing that resonates most.

It seemed to me that she had never existed. That she had been some illogical, fantastical dream that was too precious and too personal for me ever to confide in anyone.

- The overwrought writing did send me a bit to sleep at times, but I mostly appreciated it.

The bad: 

- I’ll just throw out the obvious here: weird skeezy stuff between Claudia and Louis that turned me off the first time I tried to read this. And of course the slave owning and general racism. Can’t forget that.

- Very slow paced, really drags in the beginning and the end and maybe even the middle as well (though I think the initial Paris sections are my favourite).

- There’s a lot of dispassionate telling rather than showing that sort of kills the pace, especially in relation to Lestat in the early parts of the book.

Not my favourite thing I’ve ever read, but worth it all the same.