Week Two: Interview with a Vampire (6 pts)

  Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice was a study in pretty boys, morality, and what it means to be a monster. Louis and Lestat are two sides of a spectrum. Louis holds on to the last remnants of his humanity with everything he has, while Lestat is a hedonist who lashes out , manipulates, and gorges himself with the pleasures of monsterhood. Reading this after watching the movie years prior was a rewarding experience. I found the back and forth between the two main leads engaging and provocative, with the side characters additions to the main argument insightful. 

Lestat stands out among the cast as the obvious bad boy. He’s a terrible person we love. He’s rude, narcissistic, and uncaring, but has enough wit about him to be somewhat endearing despite Louis’ best attempts to convince the interviewer that he’s the actual worst. Lestat stands out to me as the archetype of the tyrannical patriarch. Interview, despite it’s modern bells and whistles, remains a gothic story. Lestat, from the beginning, restricts both Louis and Claudia’s access to information. He keeps them in the dark in order to remain in control of their little family. This restriction as well as an enforcement of his own take on being a vampire. In the early days of their relationship, it wasn’t uncommon for Lestat to ruthlessly insult and criticize Louis for not embracing his aptitude for power. 

Evil is a point of view...We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His Earth and all its kingdoms. 

Louis and Claudia’s only way to escape is murder.  Which, sticking to the gothic genre, would be one of the many terrible secrets this little family unit holds. 

Overall, Interview was an experience in the expansion of the gothic. Each main beat falls into specific categories like the tyrannical patriarch, motifs of sex and domination, and the taboo subject of murder for pleasure. I enjoyed it and I plan to look into the rest of the series later on in the year.