On the night before the Feast of All Saints, when New Orleans families whitewash the family vaults and dress them with flowers, a small girl climbs the stairs of a Rue Royale apartment with her bonnet ribbons undone and dirt on her boots. She carries a bouquet of white chrysanthemums almost as big as she is, and narrow petals are caught all through her golden hair. She has been a vampire for decades. And she looks from one of the two men who share her home to the other and asks which of them made her what she is. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice spends its first long movement building towards that question, and its best pages are all about the answer.
A Woman Sealed Inside a Doll
The novel is narrated by Louis, a Louisiana planter turned in 1791, who tells his life to a young reporter in a San Francisco boarding room. But its most memorable creation is Claudia. Plucked dying from a plague house and remade by Louis and his maker, she keeps the plump hands and rounded cheeks of a five-year-old while her mind keeps going. Rice is precise about the strangeness of that. The child who played with dolls by the hour is soon curled in the arm of Louis’s chair reading Aristotle and Boethius, or picking out on the piano, entirely by ear, a Mozart piece she heard at the opera the night before.
The horror is not that Claudia kills, though she does, and without any of Louis’s anguish. It is that nobody in her life will let her be what she has become. She is dressed in sashes and lace gloves, carried about like a pet, and treated by both of her makers as a beautiful toy. Later, a grieving Paris dollmaker builds her a whole room of furniture at her own scale, and the gesture is so tender and so wrong that it sums up the book. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice has many beautiful scenes, but the one image it truly owns is a woman’s fury looking out of a child’s face.
The Vampire as Anne Rice’s Question
Louis is a believer who has lost his footing, and the novel treats his questions with an earnestness that was unusual for vampire fiction in 1976. He wants to know whether he is damned, whether there is a devil to answer to, and whether a creature like him belongs to anyone’s design at all. In one of the strongest passages he walks into the cathedral for the first time since his brother’s funeral and sees, in a waking vision, the saints tilt and fall and rats nest on the altar, until he understands that the only supernatural thing standing under that roof is himself.
That loneliness is the book’s real subject. Rice’s vampires are not seducers from a castle; they are orphans looking for a parent with answers. Louis’s maker, a showman with a temper, turns out to know almost nothing, and the discovery that the people who made you may have been as lost as you are gives Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice its undertow of grief.
The Old World Has No Answers
The second half of Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice follows Louis and Claudia across the Atlantic in search of others of their kind. The Eastern European chapters are the purest horror in the book: a garlic-hung inn, a dead bride laid out on a table, a ruined tower above a waterfall where something comes limping out of the dark. What they find there is not the wisdom they were promised.
Paris offers the opposite disappointment. Its vampires have made a fashionable theatre in which they perform as actors playing vampires, before audiences who do not realise the deaths are real. Beneath the stage, their meeting rooms are painted floor to ceiling with copies of The Triumph of Death, Bruegel’s army of skeletons, and the effect is grand and slightly absurd at once, as though the undead had decorated with their own press clippings. The scenes on stage are among Rice’s most striking and her most uncomfortable: the feeding is staged as erotic spectacle, and some readers will find the sexualised framing of victims hard to sit through.
The Price of a Narrator Who Waits
The limitation of the book is its narrator. Louis disapproves of almost everything and prevents almost nothing, and he describes his own hesitation at such length that whole chapters turn into weather. The conversations about evil with the ancient vampire he meets in Paris are intelligent and repetitive in roughly equal measure. The chatter of the Paris coven, which Louis himself finds tedious, is reported in full anyway. And after the long, slow build of the French chapters, a century of later wandering is compressed into a few brisk pages, as though the author had suddenly glanced at the clock.
Content warnings belong here too, stated plainly: child endangerment, child death, slavery, sexualised violence, suicidal despair, entombment and cruelty to animals all figure in the novel. Readers who can take them will find that Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice pairs well with Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the other great Gothic novel of an abandoned creature demanding to know why it was made, and with Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, whose immortal women carry the same hunger across centuries. For something lighter that still has its teeth, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix moves the genre to suburban Charleston with a wink.
Where Interview with the Vampire Came From
Anne Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in New Orleans in 1941 and died in 2021. Raised in a devout Catholic household, she left the faith as a young woman, and the gap where belief used to be is audible in every one of Louis’s questions. She was living in California when she turned an old short story into this novel, and she was mourning her small daughter, Michele, who had died of leukaemia. Readers have always taken Claudia’s golden curls and fixed age as a kind of memorial.
Critics were divided at first, but Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice found its readers. By 2008 it had sold around eight million copies, and it launched The Vampire Chronicles, which continued with The Vampire Lestat in 1985. Rice also wrote erotic fiction under the names Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure.
Its screen life has been long. Kirsten Dunst earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing Claudia in the 1994 film, a graphic novel in 2012 retold the story from Claudia’s own point of view, and in 2022 AMC began a television version with Jacob Anderson as Louis, which has since moved on into the second novel.
Final Thoughts
There is a great novel inside this good one, and it belongs to the girl with chrysanthemums in her hair. When the book keeps its eyes on her, and on the strange family of predators who cannot agree on what they are, it is as haunting as anything in modern Gothic fiction. When it turns back to Louis’s endless reflections, it drifts.
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice still rewards an October reading, for its candlelit New Orleans, its theatre of the damned and its child who grew up without growing. Louis tells the story so that someone will understand him. The reader understands Claudia instead.