The Sword and Laser discussion

This is obviously a spoilery topic. I wanted to devote a separate post to Claudia. She's an integral and active character but she's also a deeply tragic figure. If anything, her influence in the narrative may be stronger than Louis, Lestat, or Armand since she's a thread who connects them all in very different ways. Louis sees her as someone to love who needs him. Lestat, in the telling of this novel at least, sees her as a way to bind Louis to him. And Armand sees her as the obstacle keeping Louis from him.

But I wanted to start with a moment in the novel where I was at first briefly shocked, something I did not expect reading a book I had read so many times already, but then drawn back into the experience of my 11/12 year old self reading the book the first time. After killing Lestat, as Louis and Claudia believed at the time, Louis has a realization that Claudia is less human than either he or Lestat thought, less human than either might have even dreamed. A bit later, Claudia instructs Louis to let the flesh instruct the mind, meaning to kill, as the remedy for his emotional turmoil. As Claudia speaks, Louis has a flashback to the book he was holding the first time Claudia spoke those words to him. And in that moment, he sees Claudia through the lens of the poem as his forever companion.

  
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.

I was surprised in this present reading because somehow in the years since I last read Interview, I had completely forgotten the book quoted The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in that particular way. Or perhaps it's one of those memories my mind decided to shift out of my consciousness because as the stanza penetrated, I was thrown briefly back into the strong emotional reaction of my younger self encountering that part of the novel for the first time.

I do love Coleridge's poem. I have performed it for audiences. And I still know much of it by heart to this day. But my relationship with the poem is ... a complicated one to say the least. There was a particularly strange and chaotic year when I was 9 when reading that poem aloud was one of my tools to calm and soothe my mother. And at the age I first read Interview I was not far removed from that time or, in all honesty, from Claudia's age when she was made a vampire. So that scene in the book landed especially hard on child me and has never failed to make me pause when reading. In fact, this time I switched to Rime of the Ancient Mariner and read the poem out loud for myself to process.

Claudia has no memory truly of being human at all. She is an embodiment of the Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH. And yet she is trapped in a world where she must have someone in an adult body as her companion to safely navigate the human world. She is immortal yet ever in a hopeless guise, a helpless form.

And finally Louis realizes something. Is it actually Claudia's true experience? I strongly suspect not. I saw when looking through the full list of the Vampire Chronicles that Anne Rice wrote Claudia's Story in 2012. I think I need to add that to my TBR to expand the perspectives of Louis and Lestat. But this is the conclusion Louis reaches in the novel.

"And taking Claudia's playful hand, I understand for the first time in my life what she feels when she forgives me for being myself whom she both hates and loves: she feels almost nothing."

Whatever the truth of Claudia's own experience, there is something awful about being frozen in time as a young child. It's not simply the smaller body and perhaps a physical brain that never fully grows and matures in the ways a human brain would. It's that you are so obviously in a young child's body and treated that way by everyone in the human world you still must navigate to survive. I remember the experience of living in a child's body and trying to survive a world that saw nothing else. Immortally trapped in that experience? I've always felt the horror of it.

Anne Rice was deeply affected by the tragic loss of her own daughter who died of leukemia at the age of five. It became in important theme about a child trapped in an immortal body. She had a love of dolls as well. In a way, Claudia haunts not only Interview, but several of her novels after.

The only other instance I can think of with a child vampire would be in Katherine Bigelow's film Near Dark.

Robert wrote: "Anne Rice was deeply affected by the tragic loss of her own daughter who died of leukemia at the age of five. It became in important theme about a child trapped in an immortal body. She had a love ..."

There's also a child vampire in Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist and in the several different adaptations of that book - there's a Swedish movie, an American movie, and a more recent TV show. The book and movie(s) might make an interesting counterpoint to Interview with the Vampire as it touches on some of the same themes.

There are child vampires in the Anita Blake novels who are noted for being seriously damaged, unpredictable, and dangerous.

And they are referenced in the Twilight novels with historical experience involving child vampires leading it to be something vampires are forbidden to do. It's a key aspect of the Breaking Dawn plot.

Ruth wrote: "Robert wrote: "Anne Rice was deeply affected by the tragic loss of her own daughter who died of leukemia at the age of five. It became in important theme about a child trapped in an immortal body. ..."

How could I forget Let the Right One In? I've read the book, seen both movie and also a stage production.