"Interview With The Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles #1)" by Anne Rice

Sometime during my thrift store jaunts, I started noticing a lot of old hardcover books that were languishing on the shelves. I have an interest in vintage fiction, and was shocked to find first editions in that section of both Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire and Steven King's The Stand. I wasn't sold on either genre or author at the time, but picked them up because I've never had first editions of any book published prior to 2005.

This October I'd planned to read the Interview, but didn't finish it until early December and have been procrastinating on my review of it ever since. This book is very emotional, highly descriptive, and I often found myself staring into space while reading it. These are Anne Rice's famous vampires? They're kind of strange... maybe even stranger than me.

The (Basic) Plot:
A vampire named Louis offers to have an interview to a budding journalist, who becomes enthralled with Louis's story.

I think one of the things that threw me off the most is that the entire book is a dialogue, and sometimes the moody Louis stops and stares into space (just like me). He is pretty angsty for a vampire, which I understand (immortality would be kind of boring after a hundred years or so), but Louis isn't exactly what I expected of the vampires in this book.

But there was something about those darn vampires that unsettled me- I didn't see them as the least bit scary, despite all their antics. It's true I don't get scared about much anymore beyond the inhospitable environment of hospitals (the U.S. healthcare system is positively medieval), but I still expected to fear at least one of the vamps. Instead, I watched their petty rivalries and quests for knowledge play out with fascination, not fear.

My favorite character in this book, despite all the rest of the characters being well drawn out, was Lestat. The guy reminds me greatly of Joffrey of A Game of Thrones, in that he's an insufferable brat, but there's something very lovable about his brattiness (while nothing is lovable about Joffrey). Lestat does as he pleases: taunting, terrorizing, and manifesting crocodile tears to get exactly what he wants. When I see Lestat- I don't see Tom Cruise, I see Jack Gleeson.

I know why Interview With The Vampire is a classic: there's something in the way Rice spins the story, and her wordsmithery is evocative. But it was also easy for me to put it down and not pick it up until a week later, even in the midst of reading an action scene. The strength of this book lies heavily in its outstanding characters, and so I recommend this for anyone who likes character-driven vampire tales.

Rating: 4 of 5 Stars for an excellent vampire classic!

Content: Ages 18+ for violence and sexual content.

Page Count: 310 pages in my hardcover first edition.