Vampires

Last week’s reading sucked…literally. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire brought a completely new reading experience to the vampire genre. Long gone were the days of Nosferatu’s leg-sliding walk and ugly mug, as Rice took a more romantic and humanly connected take on the matter. Not a bad move on her part considering the fact that most readers of such stories are mainly female, and merging romance with steamy neck blood sucking narrations would almost guarantee her book great success.

In Interview with the Vampire tells the story of Louis, a vampire who through an off-the-record meeting with a journalist, recounts the events in his life as an immortal. Louis tells us of his life in rural New Orleans, and how he eventually came to encounter Lestat, a powerful vampire, who turns him into one and schools him on the vampire way of life. He continues to relate how he encountered the little girl Claudia, and how he regretted to convert her because he inevitably imprisoned her body into the young state it was, yet her mind would continue to develop her vampire behavior. Through out the story, Louis struggles with his desires to drink blood and his human conscience which prevents him from willingly causing harm to others. On the other hand we are also presented with the antagonist Lestat, who is clearly in command of his train of thought and his actions, and couldn’t care less about the pain his survival caused to humans.

Anne Rice clearly, among other themes in her novel, presents us with a good and evil clash. Even though the story is about vampires, most of us non-blood-sipping humans can relate to the fact that we have two sides of our brain that are conflicted when we might want to do certain things that our other side of our conscience doesn’t approve of. Anne Rice had some tragic events in her life pertaining to her child, similar to Mary Shelley, and this story filled with tragedy and mental conflict was probably a reflection of her feelings and her coping with her own conscience.