#tvl is my favourite i love rockstar lestat and Lestat: Origins

[bulltruearchive]

can’t  believe  lestat  was  just  like  nicki  is  the  love  of  my  life  &  ill  love  him  forever  but  then  he  saw  louis  &  was  like  lmao  nicki  who

[myrskytuuli]

Few days ago I finally finished Interview with the Vampire, a book I’ve meant to read a long while as an important part of foundational vampire novel canon.

I really liked it, it was a very pleasant surpirse from the vague sense of Anne Rice literature I had built up in my head. A genuine, gripping and moving Gothic. There were a lot of things that I found myself thinking “Hey, that’s what I’v been thinking about vampires for a long time!” The patheticness of their lives, the self-pitying pathos wrapped in confusion and genuine fear of being found out, mobbed by humans. At no point did the vampires feel like wish-fulfilling powerhouses, as is the pitfall of many writer who decides to write from the vampire pov. The gradual degration of Louis’ morals, but also the fact that he was a vampire to begin with, a slaver in antebellum america, who was chosen to become a vampire because he was rich, and the hypcricy of feeling that feasting on your slaves is a sin but owning slaves isn’t. The fact that all vampires were beautiful rich caucasians, because (as one can easily posit from the give facts) beautiful, rich, vampires choose other beautiful, rich people to turn into vampires. That none of them in the end live more than couple centuries before going mad, because the human mind simply cannot withstand the weight of too many memories, of the world around you changing too fast.

Which is why I think that I won’t open the rest of Rice’s books. I know the vague summaries of TVL and TQOTD and from those summaries it seems like they retcon all that I loved in IWTV.

I loved the fact that there genuinely was no answer to the question where do vampires come from. The vampires were left with the unsettling fact that they know no more about the early history of their race as any other human does. Are they a natural phenomenon, an offshoot of the evolutional mystery, or a cursed creature of devilish origin? Who knows, no one. Expect that apparently in the Queen of the Damned they extensively and detailetdly do explain the origins of the vampire race. And uuuhhh...not a fan of the idea.

And my favourite part of the book was the fate of Lestat, hiding away in a deprecit house, starving and half-mad, the proud mind finally cracked under the pressure of inevitability of time snatching away the world he had once known and been comfrotable with. Terrified with the sound of cars passing, starving because he is tto afraid to go outside where electric lights and traffic dominates. The distainful, sadistic Lestat who scorned all weakness succumbing into vampiric alzheimer was a perfect wrap for his character, neatly summing up the true curse and futility of immortality. Expect that in TVL he’s suddenly a rockstar in the 80s and uuuhhhhh...once again, not a big fan of the idea.

I’m scared of the tonal dissonance of going from IWTV which is a book about immortal rich leeches trying to come to grips with the fact that they are not special, their lives have no more meaning than anyone else’s, that nothing makes them truly happy and that they only have each other while they low-key all despise each other.

To the next books which apparently are about Lestat saving the world from girlboss first vampire trying to make evil, murderous, feminism happen and unlocks all the answers to the vampire loreTM and also plays a guitar on the side. No part of this sounds like the logical follow up the the book I read.

If someone has read the vampire chronicels, feel free to tell me your opinion about the books, and if they are actually very different to what their summaries make them sound like.