The Best and Worst Things in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles
A Whole Series Retrospective
(Originally Posted to Tumblr)
Late last June, I started The Vampire Lestat, and a few hours ago I reached the end of the audiobook of Vittorio the Vampire. In between those two moments, I read all thirteen books in the Vampire Chronicles series, both of the New Tales of the Vampires, and two out of three books in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches series, all by Anne Rice.
I’m thirty-two now and until recently, I never really thought about reading anything by Anne Rice for one extremely simple reason: I was still somehow under the delusion that I didn’t like vampires, even though my favorite sitcom, comedy movie, and dramatic film were all about vampires. Then I watched AMC’s Interview with a Vampire, decided it was my new favorite show, and I had to tell myself, “you have to stop claiming you don’t care about vampires already.” Not caring about vampires, for a certain variety of gothic outcasts, was a specific identity marker in the exact narrow period of time in which I was in high school. I was too young for Buffy, thought I was too cool for Twilight, and I have yet to earnestly care about any version of Dracula. Additionally, I’ve been in the fanfiction space since 2003, so my immediate associations about Anne Rice had little to do with her writing, and a lot more to do with her reputation. AMC’s Interview with the Vampire brought the books onto my radar, and season two airing was the reason I started reading them.
So, I read the whole series, as an adult, after the death of Anne Rice, as a completed work, without really any nostalgia for it. I didn’t read these with the purpose of reviewing them, and I didn’t even read them with the goal of completing the entire series until I realized I was only a few books away.
I figure that might make me an interesting person to review it.
I could give my full reviews of each book in the series, but I wanted to review the series as a whole, what about it works, what doesn’t work, what I like, what I don’t like, and my general takeaways.
So, here we go: the best, the worst, the outstanding, the uncomfortable, and the Anne Rice of it all:
Best: Armand Puts Rats in Blenders and That’s Just the Beginning
The primary part of Anne Rice’s writing that has breached containment from the confines her work is obviously the main character, the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. He’s iconic, and if you don’t know a lot about him you probably still have seen a movie, television show, or book created by a person who does, and put him in there somewhere. He is his own archetype: the dazzling vampire who loves life despite the trials of living through immortality, and he’s fantastic. You pick up one of the books, many of which start with some variation of, “Hey, Lestat here, reporting in,” and you’re already smiling, because he’s Lestat and he makes the people happy.
She also created the character Louis de Point du Lac, who is the other vampire archetype in every form of media created in the last fifty years, for better or for worse, and whose creation fundamentally changed the genre forever. He’s Angel from Buffy, he’s Edward Cullen, he’s Stefan from that show I’ve never watched, and probably Bill from that other show I’ve never watched. Anne Rice is so good at creating characters that she created two vampires once and people have been trying to recreate the magic ever since.
The crazy thing is, neither of these are even my favorite character in the series, for the simple reason that Anne Rice is really, really good at coming up with characters, giving them life, and making you obsessed with them forever. Some of them have entire books, some of them are on one page, but a huge number of them feel vividly real and quickly draw you into their stories and make you genuinely care for them and for their struggles. She gives you copious details, important things that matter and weird throwaway quirks and interests a real person would have. Her characters feel larger than life, but also like they actually could exist, and it makes you get totally engrossed in their stories.
Reading an entire extremely long novel, this keeps you engaged, and you still think about the characters long after you’ve closed the books. It might be a monster who represents a lot of ideas about the specific kind of pain you experienced once, an older person who feels like the older person you’ll be one day, a side character who reminds you of a friend, or just a character with a really distinctive voice that you can almost hear commenting on your day to day. Sometimes the character is just Quinn Blackwood, the strangest person who ever hypothetically lived, and you love him, and you also want him to stop telling everyone he meets about all the ghosts he’s had sex with.
My favorite character is a little freak who tried to starve to death buried in the mud because it was his childhood dream, but unfortunately, his dad told him he couldn’t, and he’s never really gotten over it, and that’s not even in the top ten most memorable things about that character. These characters feel real and grounded, and also completely surreal. I love all of them, even the ones I hate, and I don’t have much deeper insight to make this point with than that.
Worst: Daniel Isn’t on the Ceiling because Anne Rice Forgot He Exists
Anne Rice is fantastic at making a character and giving them an arc, but she is often not as great about giving characters subsequent arcs. Instead, she prefers to make new interesting, detailed characters to whom she can give creative, densely thematic arcs, and she then will abandon them too and do the same thing again with another character, and so on and so on.
There is a character in the books named Daniel who is a bit of a fan favorite because he has a beautiful, evocative, funny, detailed, crazy, romantic story, and because he’s written by Anne Rice, I unfortunately have to tell you that that entire story is in one chapter of one book and is rarely referenced again in the entire series. Daniel is in other books, either mentioned or on the page, but he never really gets to do anything. The reason for this is that Daniel’s real story arc concludes at the end of that one chapter of The Queen of the Damned, and even though she had a vague idea of how his story might continue past that, she never cared to write it. Instead, Daniel shows up as a fun prop just long enough for me to get excited, and then Anne forgets he exists again.
It almost feels like a lot of her characters are so specifically crafted for their own specific storylines that they can’t properly exist outside of them. The way Anne Rice works as an author is that she has an idea or a group of ideas she wants to explore, she creates a character for those ideas, gives them a lot of rich details, and then she writes a story about those ideas. At the end, she’s reached, often an uneasy, but a real conclusion. Sometimes she remembers there is a character from a prior book, thinks about that character, and gives that character another story, but how related that story is to their prior appearance strongly varies. Lestat is certainly the ultimate example, but he got lucky because he got tied up with a lot of ideas about trying to find happiness, truth, and authenticity among the existentialist horrors, and it’s hard to find a satisfying conclusion to a story about that.
Much more often that guy is Daniel, and she basically got all her ideas about control and submission in romance out in that one chapter, so Daniel is just hanging around, having nothing to do, being an object Marius can talk to, and wearing shoes on the beach.
This means not only might your favorite character not appear a lot in the books after they’re introduced, but also that we are constantly being introduced to new characters, some of which exist only to serve a function in a single novel, but who are now part of the cast. In the Prince Lestat books it gets exponentially worse, until 90% of the words in each scene feel like they are just lists of characters who are in the room, and none of the characters you care about from the previous books in the series get to say or do anything. It’s frustrating, but at a certain point you have reached your limit for new characters you can care about deeply, and ultimately, at all.
In the last five pages of Blood Communion, the last book in the series, the sendoff of the entire story, we meet yet another ancient all-powerful vampire, and I was like, “Anne, you already listed like forty of them and what they are all currently wearing like two pages ago! And you forgot to put Daniel on the ceiling in the big mural with all the other vampires! What are you doing?”
Best: I Am So Uncomfortable (Complementary)
Anne Rice didn’t write about ideas she had a strong, clear, well-argued viewpoint about, and instead she used her fiction to explore the kinds of thoughts and feelings that pass through your mind, but which you do not like to think about. This is the primary reason these are horror books: she does not write about easy things to think about that leave you with comfortable conclusions. Instead of trying to bring you to a forced, incomplete answer, in her best books, she is completely fine letting you sit in the place of discomfort she’s brought you to, leaving you forced to actively engage with your own wants and needs and maybe even the darkness you find within yourself. Is there some truth in the worst version of what you imagine things to be? Can you sit with that? If not, what does that mean?
Her best work in this regard is The Witching Hour, which is not technically in the Vampire Chronicles, but the same strengths are what make the end of Interview with the Vampire land incredibly loudly in your soul. It’s changed somewhat in the adaptations, because without the artistry of the way it is written it’s hard to convey the idea it is going for. The book ends with a twist where you find out that the main character, Louis, who has spent a hundred years in a romantic relationship with another character, knew the guy killed his daughter in cold blood the entire time and simply did not care enough to be mad about it. You have read an entire book where this man looks for a way to be moral to deal with the ways he’s forced to be evil, and it ends with him having concluded that the entire concept of morality has died for him, that the only thing remaining in him is his own selfishness and the fear of hell forever, and he has completely abdicated any of his own responsibility for his role in the moral scales of the universe. The book asks you, “Can you be moral in a world where you will never be perfect and will do evil things and let other people suffer in order to survive?” and the answer it gives you is, “I’m not sure you can.” It is a horrifically tragic and uncomfortable ending, it is beautifully written, and you have to stare at the ceiling for a while after you put it down because you can’t believe the author did that.
Then she keeps doing stuff like that for another fourteen books!
Not every book in the Vampire Chronicles ends as uneasily as Interview does, but that general sense of willingness to lean into the discomfort of an idea, and the way you as a reader never feel one hundred percent certain that you’re going to be left on solid ground does carry through most of the series. She’s willing to take you there, or at least to remind you that she can. Because a major theme of the books is loss and grief, the idea that you just must keep moving through these points of unease and possibly carry them with you forever gives the books an odd throughline even while they go through different genres and characters. There are few simple answers in the Vampire Chronicles, because they’re books about being alive, and there are very few simple answers to life. The books are willing to ask weird and complicated and gross enough questions that you already know the answers aren’t going to be pretty.
How are your parents both real people who exist on their own terms and have their own struggles and desires, and also the point of your genesis and something that should be an uncomplicated source of support and love within your life? I don’t know, and Lestat and his mother Gabrielle also don’t know, and they’re sure going to try to figure it out by making out with each other.
It’s taboo, it’s super uncomfortable to read, and Anne Rice was completely insane enough to write it. I hate to say it, but she’s a genius at making really messed up contradictions in our existence into really messed up stuff happening in those books that makes you feel like someone is finally willing to talk about them. Reading horrific stuff can be uncomfortable. So can being a human, and good horror fiction engages with that.
Worst: There Is a Moral Compass, but We Are Also in The Magnet Museum
The Vampire Chronicles are gothic fiction, and the characters are not intended to be morally good. That being said, when you are reading a book where people are doing quite morally horrific things, how those come across to you as a reader depends heavily on the way things are framed and talked about by the author. In horror, there is stuff the author wants you to find horrific and terrible. Anne Rice does not think you should, for example, murder people and drink their blood. Anne Rice also includes other things that are morally questionable, and for some of these things, I’m not entirely certain how she wants her readers to feel.
To cut to the chase and talk about what I’m talking about, a lot of adult men have a lot of sexual attraction to teenagers between the ages of thirteen and sixteen in this series, and it’s not always framed by the author as a problem. Do the characters have to find it morally repugnant? No, but it’s not always clear how the author thinks we as readers should feel about it. It’s not totally black and white; even though David Talbot is supposed to be a sympathetic character, this is a series where we are supposed to sympathize with monsters, and David’s attraction to teenagers is clearly framed as a somewhat monsterous thing about that character.
The book that a lot of people struggle with this aspect in is The Vampire Armand, which is one of my favorite books in the series, something I feel like I should mention before I also tell you that I agree it is the most problematic in this regard (though, because I’ve also read the book Lasher, I know it could have been a whole lot worse.) The first half of the book is largely about the sexual and romantic relationship between Armand, a well-loved character throughout the series, and his vampire maker Marius, who is physically in his forties and about 1,500 years old. Parts of the relationship are framed as not great, particularly when we see it from the older character’s perspective in Blood and Gold, but the highly romantic pseudo-incestuous sexual relationship that starts when Armand is fifteen isn’t, and that is not particularly comfortable to read when you’re an adult reading them for the first time.
One defense I often hear is that this was acceptable back at the time, to which I have two responses: first, it wasn’t acceptable in the 90’s when she wrote it, and second, there are plenty of things in the books that are in past eras with different moral standards, and you still get the sense of whether or not the author, not just the character, approves of them. We don’t burn witches, we don’t accept relationships between teenagers and adults. Both of those were things people did in the past, and the two are framed very, very differently.
My frustration with people attempting to defend some of the issues in the books is, to try to broadly say that this is a series where morality doesn’t work the same, that these are all bad people, you're negating a lot of what’s good about the series. You’ll notice I didn’t mention The Tale of the Body Thief, the book where a beloved character explicitly rapes somebody, as an example of moral problems, because I thought that plot point was thoughtfully handled and I understand its inclusion. When Anne Rice knowingly writes about characters doing terrible things she’s pretty good at it, and it cheapens her skill as a writer to say that all the bad actions of characters in the series are handled equally well. Some of them clearly aren’t.
I reject the idea that I can’t be critical of genuinely problematic aspects of a book that I love just as thoroughly as I reject the idea that I cannot love a book that has genuinely problematic aspects. Both are binary ways of thinking to oversimplify how you must interact with anything in a world where nothing is perfect, and I think both are a terrible way to approach the Vampire Chronicles. You can enjoy a series and find parts of it uncomfortable. You can enjoy something in a book you know is bad in real life. I have to say, as a person who enjoyed these books, both of these were part of my experience.
As is discussed in the series, there are gradations to evil, and gradations to goodness. I’m not saying Anne Rice didn’t understand what was moral and amoral, and I’m also not saying that I expect these things to be portrayed as black and white. What I am saying is that Anne Rice thinks a few things, particularly sexual relationships between adults and teenagers, are a lighter shade of gray than I think most people think it is, even if I do think there are nuances to her thoughts about it, and I wish she’d not made that so clear in her books.
It would certainly make it less weird for me to admit that I love The Vampire Armand as a book if she hadn’t.
Best: I Like It When the Vampires Are Vampires
Obviously, whether any author’s writing style appeals to any particular reader is going to be subjective, and Anne Rice is one of those writers whose style you either vibe with or you cannot stand. If the term “purple prose” didn’t exist, they would have needed to create it just to describe Anne Rice. She does not cut to the point, she is very long-winded and excessively descriptive in her books, and you either love it or hate it. I’m guessing a lot of people who’ve read these books had a similar experience to mine, where whether they loved or hated her writing style varied widely depending on which page we were reading.
The aspect of Anne Rice's writing style that I think she excels at in a more objective sense is her ability to handle the tone of scenes and achieve the objective that she is going for. The Chronicles do touch into different genres, but most often come back to horror, and have a lot of either dark humor associated with some of the horror elements, or strong character-based humor that lands well. I know it seems like a weird thing to say, that bestselling horror author Anne Rice is good at writing horror, but these books sit so oddly in the genre that I want to emphasize that, if a vampire is murdering a bunch of people in a scene, that scene is going to be creepy and evocative and probably have some humor in it and might give you nightmares. It's great. Anne Rice didn’t want to be a horror writer when she wrote Interview with the Vampire and didn’t like the label. Maybe if she didn’t like the label, she should have been less good at writing horror.
I used The Vampire Armand, one of my favorite books in the series, as an example in the last section for how it's problematic, but it also has some amazing vampire horror scenes in it. The scene that always comes to mind is one where the main character of that specific book, Armand, has asked to be turned into a vampire, and his dad/boyfriend/mentor Marius is having kind of a spiraling freak out about it. Marius has decided that he needs to prove that being a vampire is terrible, so he takes Armand with him to a banquet filled with delicious murderers to prove a point. The scene that precedes at the banquet is absolutely deranged, darkly funny, strongly characterized, an absolute nightmare vampire blood massacre, and just awesome. It’s awesome. It’s an awesome scene.
Also, it’s so awesome that Marius completely defeats the point of the exercise and accidentally makes being a vampire seem too cool, which is a hilarious conclusion to a horror scene.
There’s a lot of black comedy in the series, which you would expect from a horror series where vampires are the protagonists, but there’s also a lot of character-driven humor that is delightful to read. I could list examples until the end of the world, but one thing that stands out is that Anne Rice has a lot of fun writing characters who hate each other, especially if they also love each other, and have chosen to be in each other’s lives throughout eternity. You have Marius and Mael, Marius and Pandora, Lestat and Louis, Lestat and Armand, Lestat and David, Lestat and Amel, and Lestat and his cell phone. In general, there is a lot of inherent comedy to the character interactions that makes the series readable and also a bit addictive.
Horror and comedy aren’t the only things that Anne Rice is good at writing, but they are the two things she writes that have most often made me either scream or drop my Kindle, and so I figured they needed their own section.
Worst: The Racism Thing.
Sometimes people on the internet like to talk about how Anne Rice is racist because in Interview with a Vampire, she made the main character a southern plantation owner who owned slaves, and every time I see that I think, “My god do I wish that was the only problematic race stuff in the books.”
I think saying “this person is racist” is an unhelpful simplification, because it doesn’t speak to the truth of what the person does or believes that is racist, and what the impact of that is. Saying that, Anne Rice was a white liberal from the South who was born in 1941, never fully unpacked a lot of cultural ideas about “civilization” and “savagery,” and saw herself as a person who wasn’t racist, despite having some massive blind spots in her own personal views about people of color.
Basically, I’m saying this: Anne Rice was a woman of her time, but also, I know that you shouldn’t be using the word QUADROON like that, Anne.
Anne Rice constantly uses racially problematic language while describing people of color, fetishizes and exoticizes people from non-white cultures, romanticizes plantations, implies black people are inherently more capable of understanding the supernatural because they’re “less civilized,” uses a Western lens to fundamentally misrepresent the cultural practices of groups she’s not a part of to make a moral point, and also sexually objectifies South Asian men specifically, which is such an odd recurring theme that I don’t even know what to say about it. I think Anne Rice did feel a lot of love and a kind of respect for people who aren’t white, and I also wish that she’d loved and respected them enough to let some more of them read her manuscripts before they were published so they could tell her, “oh, no, you have to change this immediately, this cannot go to print.”
I have a lot of love and respect for Anne Rice. In 2015 she re-read and fell back in love with the novel Gone with the Wind, and on her Facebook page said that it was a great work of literature that more people should revisit, but contains “insidious and appalling racism,” and that, “I recommend slapping a good introduction on future editions of the book, something concise and intelligent that nails the racism in all its forms in the novel.”
What a good idea, Anne Rice, author of Merrick. What a good idea.
Best: Interrogating the Text from the Right Perspective
Even in books in the series that I don’t enjoy as much, something I respect about Anne Rice’s writing is that she is always attempting to explore a wider idea about humanity and existence, and she's trying to do it in a way that makes it feel connected to less abstract things in her world. This is why often when I talk about some of my least favorite books in the series, I respect them a lot as books even if I didn’t particularly enjoy the process of reading them, because often her ideas are interesting even if the way she writes about them isn’t.
I’m not super well versed in the canon of Western philosophy, or of any philosophy because I’ve been too busy reading vampire books for the past year. Anne Rice read a lot of philosophy, and beyond just reading it, she did a lot of thinking about it, which I assume is what you’re supposed to do with philosophy. She was a person who genuinely tried to understand and internalize these philosophical concepts in a way that could be meaningful to her, and she put them in books in ways that made them meaningful to other people. Mid-20th-century French existentialist philosophy isn’t for everyone, but it's a lot easier to comprehend when it’s through the Anne Rice vampire filter, at least for me. At a certain point when I was reading the Vampire Chronicles, I also picked up some works by Albert Camus, and they were really meaningful to me. The next day, I read Memnoch the Devil and found the exact same ideas meaningful there too.
I’m guessing for people who want different things from books about vampires, the fact that the priority guiding what's going to happen in the series comes down to what piece of philosophy has been on the writer’s mind lately is a bug, not a feature. I like it, and I don’t think it’s the Vampire Chronicles if you take all the existentialist stuff out. When the character's decisions stop making sense on a literal level, they usually start making sense on a philosophical level. When the books are at their strongest they're making sense on both at once, and it's kind of a magical experience.
When some people think of the more philosophical books in the series they usually think of ones from the first half of the Chronicles where the writing style was more literary, but some of my favorite examples of philosophical writing are from much later in the series. The book Pandora contains a lot of philosophy that is personally significant to me, and the experimental, weird, fourth wall-breaking Blood Canticle was an interesting exploration of what it means to try to live with these questions even when you don’t want to think about them anymore. Anne Rice didn’t write the Vampire Chronicles unless she had something she wanted to say, and even though it’s sometimes harder to hear, I’m always interested to find out what it is. When the writing is good it clicks perfectly, and when the writing is a little bit less good it’s a fun puzzle to figure out, and usually there’s a rewarding image at the end.
I do realize that what I’m praising here is that novels written for adults have themes and are about things, but I think the themes that this series addresses are complex and vital, and the author does a good job of incorporating them on a fundamental level of writing craft. All my thoughts about the value of forgiveness and the eternal struggle between the drive for curiosity and the emotional torment of approaching true knowledge are for a different essay. The fact that I have thought so deeply about them is a feature of the writing of these books.
I suppose what I really mean is, if you don’t appreciate the book Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis I’m just smarter than you, and I’m sorry but it’s the truth. You’re just going to have to live with that, and you better not suffer, because then the bird aliens win. You must forgive me for being smarter than you or else you’re going to end up in Memnoch Hell, or you’re not going to end up in Memnoch Hell because God isn’t real, I’m not sure. If you ask me to be more definitive on that subject, unfortunately, I’m going to have to lie on the floor of a church for five years, and you’re going to have to read Vittorio the Vampire while I figure this whole thing out.
Because I’m a much worse writer than Anne Rice, I will clarify that the above is a joke.
Worst: Sometimes Anne Isn’t Sure What She’s Talking About Either
Anne Rice writes about big, complex ideas in big, complex books. Sometimes the ideas are complex and artfully woven into a narrative, and through the characters’ experiences you not only start to feel like you understand the complex underlying philosophy but have naturally come to understand it through the emotions of the characters. Sometimes, the page count is just the number of pages you need to understand a massive idea, but sometimes the page count becomes Anne Rice trying and failing to explain an idea she’s not great at explaining, and is kind of failing to artfully convey.
The book I can point to most easily for this as an example is Memnoch the Devil, a book that does, at the end, get to an actual point. Unfortunately, before that, it has the devil list the stages of human evolution in detail for like a hundred pages in the middle so that Anne feels like she’s really hammered home her idea. Sometimes it’s, “yes, I’ve gotten it already, can we move on?” and sometimes it’s, “wait, I am so confused. I think you might also be confused? Why am I reading you trying to figure out what you’re talking about in real time?”
This becomes even more evident the further you get into the series because she will often explore the same themes from different angles. She will get better at explaining an idea in a subsequent book that she spent a huge number of tortured pages trying to explain to you the first time. Again, talking about Memnoch the Devil, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis touches on many similar themes, but is written by an author who has honed these concepts after twenty years of frustrated feedback about Memnoch. At other points in Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, there are concepts that she tried to explain in Memnoch, is trying to explain again, and which she is still spending too much time not clearly conveying, and it’s very frustrating.
Does a soul have a tangible, physical body? A real body, a body that is science, not religion, but is tangible and real and made of matter? Actually made of matter, not of energy, and it has a shape that is fundamental to it but also able to change, but also invisible but also not invisible? It’s etheric, it’s an actual tangible physical etheric body, and it’s a soul and physical and also spiritual? Is it made of electromagnetic waves? Can it have tentacles? Etheric, physical, plastic, real, scientific, spirit tentacles?
How did she spend so much of this series trying to explain that and I somehow still have no fucking idea what she was talking about?
Best: I must love weeping, otherwise why would I do it so much?
I am a highly emotional person, I cry easily, and I laugh easily. When it comes to emotions, for me, the gain, like on an audio mixer, is turned up a little too high. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone, but it’s hard for a literal description of an emotional experience to express how an emotional experience feels to me. I think our emotions are bigger than the words we use to describe them. They’re more complicated, they have dimensions and spread outside of their bounds, and multiple things that should contradict all feel totally real at once. Where I think Anne Rice most succeeds as an author is in translating that element of the experience of life into her books. Our vampires do not feel emotions on the same scale, with the same gain, as your average person that you would meet on the day-to-day. They don’t experience the same stuff people do on the day-to-day, but they're good at representing the way the day-to-day can feel emotionally.
My favorite book in the Vampire Chronicles is The Vampire Lestat for this exact reason. Lestat is an emotional guy, but he also experiences things in that book that are fantastical situational stand-ins for feelings that we can only describe in a mundane way, but feel larger in life in an almost supernatural, or, should I say, preternatural, way. There is a scene early in The Vampire Lestat that is similar to a real experience of mine I’ve tried and failed to explain to other people, and in the book, it is really concisely and specifically written in a way that validates how it felt to go through. Later in the book, there’s an event that represents the feeling of realizing that someone you loved may not have handled that love with care and instead handled it with resentment. You could list the emotions that make up that emotional experience, but it wouldn’t be able to capture that feeling because the words we use to describe emotions are limited. In the realm of fantasy fiction your options to explore these emotions are endless, and describing a moment where you come to fully understand the darkness in another person works a lot better through the metaphor of drinking someone’s blood.
There are a lot of concepts in the Vampire Chronicles that take a complex subjective experience and, in the realm of fantasy, manage to sum it up in all of its messy, horrible, amazing glory. One that isn’t even particularly emphasized is one I think shows this strength of the series, and it’s a small recurring reference in The Vampire Lestat to a location in his home village that he refers to as The Witches’ Place. In the literal text this is a place where at some point prior to Lestat’s life women were executed for practicing witchcraft, but he mentions it repeatedly throughout the novel because it represents a complex emotional feeling that is difficult to simply describe. The Witches’ Place in The Vampire Lestat is symbolic of the ways that humanity's structures of belief lead to meaningless suffering, and the way living with the knowledge of that can either destroy you or be a sorrow you fight against your entire life. I just tried to describe what it represents in the book, but when you read Lestat lying underground in the dirt, imagining a scenario in which he would have been killed by a mob, and concluding “there never would have been any witches' place for me,” you don’t need to know what it means in words. You’ve felt what it means, you’ve read half of a book about what that means, and it feels true.
Worst: The Vampire Chronicles is Kinda Like Star Wars
You know how the Star Wars Prequels are basically the unfiltered creative vision of George Lucas, and everyone hates them? He made one great movie, two great sequels, and then when people were excited to see him make more of this story that he had so compellingly crafted, the first movie they got was a political drama that made no sense, starred children, and had Jar-Jar Binks in it? When people watched it, they were like, “Maybe, sometimes, the author’s pure creative vision is not what we want, and is kind of bad, also.”
I’m not going to try to define what book is the Phantom Menace of the Vampire Chronicles because I liked Blood Canticle, so clearly I’m not qualified to make that value judgment. What I will say is that Anne Rice was a wild creative visionary who didn’t give a fuck what people thought when she was writing her books, and sometimes when she did that, she made The Empire Strikes Back, and sometimes when she did that, she made Attack of the Clones.
Sometimes when you take big swings you end up with big misses, and trying to explain that we wouldn’t get the gloriously innovative outsider sensibility that brought us the rest of The Tale of the Body Thief without also getting some of its worst aspects still leaves you reading something that feels like an ad for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines in the middle of the book. Sometimes you are reading a thoughtfully crafted horror novel, and sometimes, you are reading a thin justification for the author to talk about her latest hyper fixation on Rembrandt, or cameos, or Atlantis, or gaudy neo-Baroque interior decorating, or something to do with Rome I couldn’t care less about, or how great Charles Dickens is, or how invasive fiction editors can be, or the Pope, or any of a very distinctive set of sexual fetishes, or what every single person is wearing and the color and texture of every single last piece of furniture in the room. Stop describing the embroidery on that tapestry, Anne, and have someone get blood all over it already!
Anne Rice was a weird person and a weird writer, and, to me, mostly in either glorious ways or delightfully quirky ones. She wrote whatever she wanted to write, often without a lot of consideration for what her readers wanted to read. It makes for an uneven experience, to say the least.
Mona Mayfair might be the Jar-Jar Binks of the Anne Rice oeuvre.
Best: Immortality, or The Anne Rice Metanarrative
Fuck the “death of the author.” This is a book series about the undead.
In simple terms, the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice is a book series, in the fantasy horror genre, about vampires, but in many ways it’s also just a human soul, somehow translated into ink and paper. It’s flawed and uneven and problematic and filled with unconscious bias, and it’s also emotional and wise and loving and uncertain. I didn’t know Anne Rice. We never met. I didn’t read any of the books until after she died. I wouldn’t pretend like I could say I meaningfully can tell you who she was as a person. I don’t know the person her friends and family knew.
But I know these books, and in that sense, I know her about as well as I know myself.
The stories that really stick with you are the ones that you can enjoy on multiple levels. The Vampire Chronicles are on one level a story about a guy who had an existential crisis when he was twenty years old and then became a vampire and was never able to quite get over it, on another level it’s the story of a group of varied characters and the ways they hurt and heal each other over centuries of time, on another level it's a love story where a guy learns to love the people around him and himself despite all the terrible things about life, and on yet another it's a horror series about vampires who do really messed up stuff that’s entertaining to read about. These books can be a lot of things to different people, and they are a lot of the things I just wrote about to me, but in between all of the worst parts of them, the weird tangents, the story beats that make no sense, the characters who piss me off, there's always the other story.
It’s a story about a woman who was raised extremely religious and one day realized she didn’t believe in God anymore, experienced some of the most painful losses human beings can experience, incredible successes and loves, and just went through the entire process of life and tried to understand what it meant in words and images that are still here for the rest of us. You can see the real person behind these pages, the pain, the joy, the flaws, the love, and the constant fear that there might not be any meaning to it all battling against the hope that there could be. More than that, now, you get to see a lifetime of that, different concerns and new revelations and views that change over time, new fascinations and preoccupations and worries and all the things, the hard to explain, hard to define things, that just are life. I don’t think Anne Rice had some insane amount of wisdom none of the rest of us can aspire to, but she didn’t need to. She just walked the Devil’s Road like the rest of us, and happened to find the words to describe it.
There are some things about Anne Rice and I that are the same, and in other ways I know we are different, but we still feel the same, hurt the same, and try the same. One time I tried to explain this to a friend in simple terms. I think I did it badly, but I think I got the feeling right: “She felt as uncertain about everything as I do, and maybe if she could get through life, it makes it feel like I can too.”
I guess what I’m really saying, is this: Anne Rice was not the exotic outcast she’d once imagined, she was the dim magnification of every human soul.
Anne Rice was a good writer and a bad writer, and probably also a good person and a bad person. I probably am too, and so are you, and so is everyone, and if you can’t love a book series that’s just as complicated and messy and great and terrible as you and I and Anne Rice are then you don’t need to read it, but I needed to. At the end of the day, I needed to. Months ago, when I started it, I needed to. I didn’t know I needed to, but I did. I didn’t know that I needed someone to see me the way these books made me feel seen, but I did. Maybe at one point I really will need to again. Someone will always probably need to.
Towards the end of her life, Anne Rice would make comments about how she knew she would one day die, but that she really hoped that Lestat never would. And he won’t.
You know, because he’s a vampire.
Epilogue: Misc Thoughts and Opinions
This is my big retrospective of the series, so I figured I’d also throw a few random thoughts here on the end.
My top three books in the series were, in order, The Vampire Lestat, The Vampire Armand, and The Queen of the Damned.
My bottom three books in the series, in a rough order, are Memnoch the Devil, Merrick, and Vittorio the Vampire.
In the middle, I enjoyed Blood Canticle and Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis more than most people do, I maybe enjoyed Blood and Gold a bit less than most people do, as I tend to find Marius’s narration boring.
I read the books in the order: TVL, QotD, IWTV, TotBT, MtD (originally started), TVA, PL, Pandora, B&G, PL:RoA, BC2, MtD (Finished), TWH, Merrick, Lasher, BF, BC1, VtV. This was based on my own preferences, the fact I’d seen the movie, and a recommended order to read the books from Reddit that I found very helpful (which specifically pushes Prince Lestat much earlier).
I read these in a mix of audiobooks, ebooks, and physical books, and frequently a mix of these for one book. The book I needed an audiobook most for was Blood and Gold and the one I enjoyed the audiobook most for was Blackwood Farm.
I absolutely loved The Witching Hour, and I think it’s her second-best book. Lasher not as much, which is why I ended up not reading Taltos before Blackwood Farm, though I may still go back for it.
The character I liked the most was Armand, I relate the most to Lestat, and my personal philosophical views are most accurately represented by Pandora.
The hardest I cried in the entire series was at the end of Prince Lestat, though the end of Blood Communion was a close second.
The hardest I laughed was reading the first chapter of Blood Canticle, and what I refer to as the “Reading is What? Fundamental” portion of The Vampire Armand.
The book I had the best time reading was The Vampire Lestat since it was the first one I read. I also had a lot of fun reading Blackwood Farm.
The book I had the hardest time reading was Memnoch the Devil, which I gave up on three times before ultimately finishing it.
The longest, best sections of just actual writing are in the last third of Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat has the best quotes, and the best chapter in the series is in The Queen of the Damned (and you know exactly which one).
If I tried to say my favorite scene in the series, I would keep flip-flopping between different scenes in the sections of The Vampire Lestat called “The Children of Darkness” and “The Vampire Armand.”
Reading the books made me appreciate the tv show more in some ways, and also have issues with it I didn’t before. It equals out basically where I started: it’s my favorite show, it’s not perfect, and I’m a big fan. My main criticisms are based on the lore, which I think they adapted in ways that is too obviously a shortcut in some places. Most other choices in the adaptation I think are fine or really interesting and creative