5 stars
First Sentence: “I see…” said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window.
Thoughts: With this book, the Brooding Vampire Genre came into being. Anne Rice’s vampire series was great until she went off the deep end. I actually read all of them up until the one where she combined her witch series and vampire series. That’s when I realized she had completely lost the plot. Now I choose to remember only the high points of the series, which is this, the first book.
It begins in San Francisco. A young man met a stranger in a bar and asked to interview him. The young man did that, wandered around collecting stories of the common man like a proto-Story Corps or Humans of New York. This time, however, the man he wanted to interview turned out to be a vampire. The vampire didn’t want to feed on the man…yet. He wanted to tell his life story. The interviewer put a fresh cassette into his tape recorder and they began.
It began in the late 1700s in Louisiana with a man named Louis de Pointe du Lac. He had a plantation and a family, but when his younger brother died in mysterious circumstances, Louis went downhill. He began drinking and courting death. Death came to him in the form of a vampire. It didn’t kill him, though. The vampire, Lestat, wanted Louis’ plantation so he could keep his elderly father there. Oh, and he could make Louis a vampire if he wanted. Louis did want so, after viewing his last sunrise, he shared blood with Lestat. And so Louis became the Broodingest Vampire of Them All.
Lestat and his father moved into Pointe du Lac where he and Louis began a life of subterfuge. Louis insists throughout the book that he couldn’t stand Lestat, but he never really tried to break off their relationship. He claimed it was because he knew Lestat knew more about vampires than he did, but was it? Was it really, Louis?
Eventually they move (or are driven) off the plantation and move into a townhouse in New Orleans. Louis, on one of his midnight walks, found a little girl clinging to her dead mother. He fed on the little girl, but left when Lestat started laughing at him. The next night Lestat brings the little girl back to Louis and they make her a vampire. They treat her as their daughter, although Louis’ relationship becomes creepier as she grows up. Mentally, not phyisically. She turns into a woman in the body of a four-year-old child. As you might expect, she does not like this. She blames Lestat because she doesn’t sleep with him. She tries twice to kill him and then runs off with Louis to take a tour of Europe.
They try to find vampires in eastern Europe but only find monsters. They head to Paris where the other vampires meet them. Specifically Santiago who hates Claudia at first sight and Armand who loves Louis at first sight. And vice versa for both. Claudia realizes Louis is going to leave her for Armand, so she begs him for one last favor: give her another adult vampire to protect her. She’s gone one picked out already!
Then Lestat shows up. Oops.
The Eclectic Reviewer 