Interview with the Vampire is a weird book. Conceptually, I like it, as I like frame stories and I like vampires and I like surprise queerness, and this book represents a sort of paradigm shift in terms of vampire representation in literature, but it was a little hard to read. Overall, I am glad to have read it (as I am with most books, let's be real).
The frame story in Interview With The Vampire is an excellent one; the vampire Louis is recounting the tale of his life to a reporter in a hotel room in modern-day California, I believe. (Modern-day being contemporary of when the book was written, the 1970s). We are limited in our learning in two ways. We only learn about the vampire's life through him telling the reporter, and we only learn about vampires in general as Louis does in his story, being a new vampire. By not giving us too much information and letting all the knowledge come organically, Rice is simulating Louis experience and his quest for knowledge in our quest of reading about it.
Anne Rice is quoted as dealing with themes of "death, immortality, existentialism, and the human condition," which I think is an accurate assessment of what she was trying to do with Interview. I mentioned before that this book has been heralded as a paradigm shift in vampire lit, but it was also a shift in vampire mythos itself, establishing new rules for vampire creation and life. The vampires in Rice's novel are not pure cardboard cutouts of evil, scary monsters that go bump in the night. Centering this story around the creation and experience of one particular vampire lends a relatability to the vampires, an empathizing that was previously not seen. She paved the way for vampires to be characters and not simply vehicles of terror. It is perhaps the first time we are privy to the misunderstood vampire, the outcast and outlier nature, cut off from a sense of community, aspects that can be quite easily drawn in connection with current queer struggles. Of course, most queers don't need the blood of humans for sustenance, though.
And that is one thing I want to make sure I touch on, the queerness of it all. I saw the film version of Interview a very long time ago, and I don't really remember all of the movie, but I appreciate the fact that this reviewer said that it was NOT "de-gayed." Louis spends most of his time searching for a community, for someone or something to make him whole and to help him understand what he is. There are strong echoes of the queer experience in that search, and he seems to find a semblance of answers in another (male) vampire named Armand. There is a sensual almost-kiss in the film between Armand (Antonio Banderas) and Louis (Brad Pitt), and I think that is very important.
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