Interview with the Vampire

The Vampire Chronicles, Book 1

De: Anne Rice

Narrado por: Dan Bittner

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 O’Brien Rice (P)2026 Audible, Inc.

A good editor could make this great

With the right editor, this book could be a masterpiece. The good parts are phenomenal but there's an extraordinary amount of superfluous junk that should have been left on the cutting room floor. It begs for a proper faithful adaptation. Sadly all we get is the great but far, far too short 1990s movie and the modern tv show which eschews faithfulness to the source for modern sensibilities.

What in the Steve Inskeep!?

The campiest book ever, read in NPR voice. This thing is totally ridiculous. Highly recommended!

Love the audio book reader

I admire the narrator of this audiobook; his performance was excellent and easy to follow. The delivery was well handled. I enjoy this book and am already listening to the next installment in the series.

Excellent!

I loved every single minute of this book! I am also thrilled that the movie was so close!

Extremely captivating

Interview with the Vampire had me on the edge of my seat. The voice actors brought me into the scene and the writing kept me there.