Jesse > Recent Status Updates

I forgot to mention how eerily the whole Father and Mother dynamic mimics the Origin from Attack on Titan.

Rice pulls back and paints with a very broad brush when the story overlaps with Louis’s. The story gets twisted a bit here. When Lestat is at his most pathetic and beleaguered in the story it kind of makes sense, but there’s a lot of big asks when it comes to explaining away his motivations and cruelty.

I am beginning to realize that we are not going to reach the Lestat’s adventures with Louis train in this novel. These 50 pages are given to Marius, with an explanation as to the origin of all vampires and the revelation of Akasha and Enkil as the first two, and the idea of so much of religion being used to contain the inherent evils of their power. Dang does Rice have a lot to say about religion.

Marius has nothing existentially to offer that we haven’t already seen in Lestat or Louis’s stories: if you live forever then you must wrangle out your own purpose in life. One must imagine Sisyphus happy…

Where we start to blow up here is the introduction of Those Who Must Be Kept, an ancient Egyptian vampire king and queen who are not quite catatonic. It’s a very sublime Weird Fiction moment.

the LORE

We get Armand’s backstory and we also get new concepts: Children of the Millenium, vampires who do not flame out, as well as the mysterious “Those Who Must Be Kept” that Marius hinted at (and the Italian coven tried to find). this book has a lot of Myth of Sisyphus stuff going in for it as most vampire flame out due to a lack of meaning in their lives.

Armand is now fully integrated into the narrative. The subtext of the world Rice is laying out depends on a parent/child relationship where the “parent” vampire cannot telepathically communicate with the “children” and vice versa. Armand is communicating a reductive, jaundiced view of parent/child structures, where vampires tend to gather under those who they can transmit thoughts and feelings to.

this is Anne Rice at her most iconoclastic but also Lestat as a sort of Forrest Gump of vampires figure. I mean it’s only natural that he should run into Armand while he is around in France, but the idea that prior to Lestat, vampires where self-appointed and God-fearing children of Satan, is a bit on the nose. I suppose that part of it is to line out why its universe has myths about vampires shunning crosses.

Lestat is confronted with his mother’s imminent mortality and asks her, do you want to become a vampire? And she says, “Hell yes I want to become a vampire!!” The story gets weird here as the story quasi-incestual nature of their relationship is more manifest when the two of them are vampires…not that it’s as weird as Louis and Claudia were. Of course, I’m sure that vamp-Gabrielle will work out great!!!

Lestat is a mysterious character in the first book. We never find out his origin, the significance of his blind father, only that he provided for him up until his death out of some feeling of obligation. Rice’s BIG REVEAL just raises more questions, but it DOES fall in line with part of what Louis and Claudia suspected. He knew nothing, and his master was dead, but not through any action of Lestat’s.

This is the TRUE STORY of Lestat, who bookended Louis’s story from Interview With the Vampire. The opening tone is very tongue-in-cheek. Lestat had awoken late in the 20th century and has decided to join up with a goth band, Satan’s Night Out, to become a rock star. He also finds out that Louis’s tell-all has been published as a work of fiction. Naturally, he must tell HIS side of the story.

trip report part 1: interview with a vampire

I picked up the vampire chronicles trilogy because, well, it’s a seminal work of vampire fiction and I looked to it as a sort of stepping stone to Twilight, whose footprint is far more recent. Idk how there could possibly be any overlap between the message that Interview lays out and what Twilight is about.

this is the painful end of an era among the vampires. You could know that Lestat would eventually reappear, but he is a broken thing, with his use to the Parisian vampires limited to the justification of their murdering Claudia and Madeleine, which Armand explains is forbidden purely because it is too exciting for one vampire to murder another.

Paris gives us a real taste of the vampire community. Armand’s vampires are a clique; Louis and Claudia are outsiders not because they (not quite) killed Lestat but because Claudia is frozen forever with the body of a small girl and because Lestat cannot disassociate from human suffering, making them “weak” vampires. I vividly remember watching the “play” at the Theatres des Vampires.

Claudia and Louis go to Europe in search of vampires—to fulfill Claudia’s desire to unravel the science of vampires. They try Eastern Europe, but almost all of the things that they find there are nigh-mindless fiends. The only major episode of Part II details their first encounter, coming across a village that is suffering under the ravages of I suppose a very long-lived ghoul.

Claudia has an existential crisis. As a vampire with very little memory of being human, she was taught to kill by Lestat and educated by Louis. With a keen intellect, she plots and orchestrates Lestat’s apparent death like a boss. Im 99% sure he’s not permanently dead. Louis is such an Ashley that he can’t countenance Claudia after she does it! Like, dude? He was a total narcissist!!!

having seen something like the last portions of the movie, I had some knowledge of Claudia, but it is horribly different to read Lestat turning a 5 year old girl into a vampire in order to keep Louis with him, and then Louis becoming aware that she is growing into a vampire woman in a child’s body, and understanding that this entire plot point if not the novel is inspired by the death of Rice’s daughter.