|Vampires| - Anne Rice's "Interview with The Vampire" - Book Review

I'm not embarrassed to say the only experience I have reading vampire books comes from Twilight books. But now that I've entered the Anne Rice universe, I know this is the vampire content I was looking for all along.

What a cast of interesting characters, I must say! I loved the contrast between Louis and Lestat. How even though they're both vampires accompanying each other through immortality, Louis still has some humanity in him. How he doesn't agree with the ways of Lestat and has a different perspective on the feeding aspect of their lives. He's been with him for so long but is making plans to leave and keep living without the necessity of being together.  

Their relationship is definitely interesting.  

These vampires are not normal-looking humans who sparkle in the sunlight and have supernatural powers like seeing visions of the future. They're monsters with animalistic instincts and we are meant to be scared of them. Even then, we as regular mundane people see them as important creatures whose immortality makes them stronger and "better". We have a psychotic and sociological relationship with them, as if we understand them and see them as humans, as well. We see them as the victims of their own fate.  

They have a battle between their animal instincts and their human instincts. A battle between the body and the mind, trying to repress a certain amount of animal instinct in order to be a more well-mannered human being. There's a lot of suffering that happens throughout the novel, but that's part of the Gothic literature and we are invested on what happens to Louis while he transitions to his new afterlife as a vampire. No matter how painful it seems for the character, we are interested in every single detail and decision. Just like the human who is actually interviewing Louis in present time in the story.  

It’s no surprise it's filled with grief with such tragic background from the author. One can tell the novel was therapeutic to Anne Rice to comb with the loss of her daughter through writing these pained characters. Especially Claudia who is an evidently inspired by Rice's daughter. Claudia is scary to many because she is frozen in time. An intelligent, mature woman in a child's body. Rice was going through so much burden but instead of not doing anything about it she instead decided to write a story about the deepest, darkest areas of her psyche. That's how Anne Rice got so much emotion and impact on her novel and I really appreciated that.  

There's some kind of bromance between Louis and Lestat throughout the novel. Rice is not afraid to go there with showing such close relationship between the two main vampires. She replaces sex with feeding off of blood as the protagonists bond with each other. It's a different body to body bond. She finds a way to juxtapose the two different characters and show how one is more advanced and careless than the other. They both spend so much of their time together talking. Rice is making a point of how to sustain a relationship; through communication. Both of them talk things out in direct ways. Power is distributed between them. Louis is less powerful than Lestat when it comes to knowledge, but in the end, this get flipped.  

This is a novel where the guys go around and are not insecure about their masculinity, which was rare back then. Gender is just not the center of the novel. It's just not there. It's important to understand what position someone is when it comes to power dynamics, rather than your sexual orientation. What remains is power and the need to satisfy your nature through means of conversations and the alike. That's pretty much the subgenre of the novel.  

In the end, this novel was filled with pain, power dynamics and just lots and lots of suffering. But it definitely does not stop from being an amazing piece of literature. It was an incredible ride to learn about the struggles of these vampires and what they've chosen for themselves in the afterlife. Definitely ready to read the next eleven (and about to be twelve) books on the chronicles and pop in the movie for once and for all!