Interview with the Vampire

By: Anne Rice

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

40th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author, "a magnificent, compulsively readable thriller...Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth—the education of the vampire” (Chicago Tribune). • The inspiration for the hit television series

The time is now.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . .

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir--young, romantic, cultivated--to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . .

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire--all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child--and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death--a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below . . .

We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be . . .

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires--the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . .

In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order.

©1976 Anne Rice (P)2011 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[A] magnificent, compulsively readable thriller...Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth - the education of the vampire.” (Chicago Tribune)

“Unrelentingly erotic...sometimes beautiful, and always unforgettable.” (Washington Post)

“If you surrender and go with her...you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.” (Boston Globe)

great

ut is one og ny favarorites of this genre, from start to finish ut is great.

Anne Rice writes beautifully, even if it is a lot.

I struggled with this book I think because of the audio book aspect of it. The book goes very deeply into Louis' thoughts, and it can sometimes feel a little bit like a rabbit hole. He has a conversation with someone, which triggers a flashback or memory in which he has yet another conversation. Think "inception". But, I enjoy the back and forth on vampire morality and values, and the meaning of life for both human and vampire. I think the audio for these books would be better with a full cast.

Excellent!

I saw the movie, but the book has inspired me to read more of the Vampire Chronicles.

loved it. i will be listening to the next book!! I

I will be listening to the entire series. I loved the narrator. I hope he does the entire series.

Excellent!

Extremely well written, as the reader you truly gain insight into every emotion each character feels and can clearly “see” each aspect of each scenes come together.

Awesome

Enjoyed the reader and the story immensely. Perfect listen for a 30 to 60 minute drive to work. I didn’t mind getting stuck in traffic because the story was so well told.

Just great all around

it was as much a page turner as I remember. Didnt even know there was others, so looking forward to that!

A good introduction

A good introduction to The Vampire Chronicles and the characters within. The narrator was, at some moments, very depressing and I struggled reading his point of view that showcased his utter self-loathing, but as a whole, the depressing moments were overshadowed by the different dynamics between the characters that were at play. The "reveal" at the end wasn't much of a reveal, and I wish they had spent more time on Armand and Louis' life post-France, but overall I really enjoyed this book. Definitely leaves you wanting more- for me, specifically, more of Lestat and Armand.

interview with the vampire

I didn't know that this series of books existed. I stumbled upon them by accident, and I'm really happy I did. I loved the first book, and I can't wait to start the second one 😀

A Curse or a Gift?

The contrast of life and death: to some immortality is a curse, to others vampirism a gift - experiential of course. The humanization of a vampire brings with it a resonance of humanity within evil. Where some prefer the ‘monsterous’ vampire - more ‘ID-like’ without thought, feeling and concern…Anne Rice has increased a paradigm shift: a self reflective vampire who struggles with his ‘gift/curse’. Humans can understand suffering in a different light as time is elastic to vampires; to Humans time is ever more precious. Time ages Humans allowing for an ease in passing and being more at ease with the inevitably: Death. What has changed over a lifetime by the end is unbearable as the quality of life diminishes. Pain, like happiness and the myriad of emotions cannot last forever or be sustained. When passion fades, perhaps so do we.