Keywords

Introduction

In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the fragrance of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long-lost perfume. – Interview with the Vampire (Interview with the Vampire 1:47.05-1:47:25)

On January 15, 2022, on the tarmac at New Orleans National Airport, the heavens poured and the thunder rolled, as the spirit world of one of the most unique cities on earth heralded the return of one of its own. The funeral service of Howard Allen Frances O’Brien was a private affair in which she, in the words of her son, Christopher, “entered immortality” (Christopher Rice).

Few people knew the given name of the woman laid to rest. Audacious even as a child, Howard was in middle school when she decided she wished to be known by a name of her own choosing, though it is arguably doubtful even she was aware of the millions who would come to know her by the name she chose: Anne Rice (Rice, Called Out of Darkness ch. 4). A New York Times bestselling, award-winning, author of over forty books published between 1976 and 2022, Rice was a giant in the genres of horror, paranormal, and supernatural fiction. She sold an estimated 150 million books over her 45 year career and had two films made from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles; the first, 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, was the highest grossing Rated R film of its time (Natale). Rice’s works were also adapted into a AMC television series, which debuted in October of 2022 (Interview with the Vampire).

The Vampire’s Perspective

One of the earliest influences on my writing and my view of the fictional world was “Interview with the Vampire,” a landmark book by any reckoning. Rest in peace, Anne Rice. – Charlaine Harris, author of the Southern Vampire Mystery series (adapted as HBO’s True Blood) (Charlaine Harris)

In 1976, Anne Rice set the stage for what would become one of the most influential vampire texts of the twentieth century with the publishing of her seminal novel, Interview with the Vampire. The novel was the first of a thirteen-book series titled The Vampire Chronicles. All totaled, the series has sold an estimated 80 million copies worldwide (Schindler).

When examining the legacy and impact of Rice’s work, in regard to the vampire and horror genres, it is necessary to understand the reason Interview with the Vampire, and the subsequent novels in The Vampire Chronicles, have differentiated themselves from the vampire texts of the past; and the influence of these changes on the authors of the genre who would follow.

In the early 1970s, vampires were portrayed as villains, conforming to a list of specific characteristics set forth in Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula blended with a combination of characteristics taken from other early myths (Stoker). In Dracula, Professor Van Helsing describes vampires as creatures

so strong in person as twenty men […] he is a brute, and more than brute: he is devil in callous, […] he can, within his range, direct the elements: the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things the rat, and the owl, and the bat – the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown. (Stoker 209)

These attributes became widely associated with the vampire; not only through the written fiction, but film and stage interpretations as well. Core traits of conventional vampire narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth century depicted vampires as monstrous, evil creatures of the night. They were frequently associated with deserted locations and cemeteries and were said to be repelled with symbols of good or righteousness, generally of a religious nature. This gave rise to the prominence of religious icons such as the Christian cross or holy water (Wood 59–78). These vampires frequently had the ability to magically transform themselves into creatures associated with the night; such as wolves, bats, or crows. They had no reflections, due to their lack of a soul. They fed on the blood of innocent, predominantly young virgins. Many were either weakened by, or were unable to enter, sunlight (Wood 61).

What sets Interview with the Vampire apart from the works that preceded it was a series of changes to these genre standards. The first of such changes implemented by Rice concerned perspective, specifically the point of view from whom vampire novels were portrayed. Rice accords her vampires an unmediated voice so they can describe the stories of their lives through the ages from a first-person perspective. In her work, The Vampire Defanged, Susannah Clements argues that:

Most readers and scholars agree that Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was a turning point in the tradition of vampire mythology and literature because of the way Rice abruptly shifted the narrative perspective from the vampire hunters to the vampires themselves and gave her vampires a complex consciousness. (Clements 35)

Prior to the 1970s, vampire fiction was chiefly narrated in the form of “letters, diaries, journals, [or] discovered confessions,” as opposed to first- or third-person narration (Wood 67). This style of narration helps to effectively separate the monster from the reader by causing the monster to become “accessible only through several layers of narrative filtering” which helps to transport the monster to a realm outside of the reader’s own experience (Wood 67). Key examples include tales such as Dracula, where the novel is told in a series of collected letters and journal entries which are gathered after the defeat of the vampire (Stoker). Another example is Carmilla, where the story is told many years after the incidents with the vampire took place (LeFanu 103–157). Telling the story retrospectively serves to eliminate the immediate sense of threat that is often associated with tales told in the more present tense, as the threat of the vampire has been eliminated before the tale even begins.

In contrast, Anne Rice’s novels are in both present and in the first-person narration. This change in both style and time setting, compared to previous vampire novels, helps to connect readers to both the vampires who are telling their stories and the world around them. Clara F. McIntyre refers to this act of taking a traditionally villainous character and placing them into the role of the protagonist as creating a “villain-hero” (McIntyre 874–880). She defines a villain-hero as:

a man who, for a selfish ends, willfully and deliberately violates standards of morality sanctioned by the audience or ordinary reader. When such a character is given the leading role and when his deeds form the centre of dramatic interest, the villain has become the protagonists, and we have the type play with the villain as the hero. (McIntyre 874)

When a character who is traditionally a villain, such as a vampire, becomes the protagonist of the tale, they take on the traditional role of the hero, creating a type of paradox. This paradox exists because either the real hero must take the role of the antagonist or, as in the case of several of Rice’s novels, the villain actually becomes the hero. Rice embraces this by taking the second option, challenging the vampire’s traditional role as a villain and having her characters boldly declare themselves to, in fact, be heroes.

Examples can be found in Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief, in which Lestat informs readers that the novel they are preparing to read is a story which:

takes us into the mind and the soul of its hero – guess who? – for its discoveries. Read this tale, and I will give you all you need to know about us as you turn the pages. And by the way, lots of things do happen! I’m a man of action as I said – the James Bond of the vampires if you will – called the Brat Prince, and the Damnedest Creature, and “you monster” by various and sundry other immortals. […] The point is – this is my book from start to finish. (Rice, Body Thief 2)

Here, Lestat describes himself as not only the novel’s protagonist, but also the story’s hero, offering the comparison to the iconic heroic role of James Bond. Lestat also mocks and embraces the other titles by which he is known: “Damnedest Creature” and “monster.” This admission of both his heroic aspirations and admitting to his more villainous identities helps to create a bond of honesty between himself and the reader, admitting the positive and negative aspects of his character. In Memnoch the Devil, book five in The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat reinforced this bond, stating. “I maintain myself as morally complex, spiritually tough, and aesthetically relevant. […] I have set myself the task of being a hero in this world” (Rice, Memnoch 2). Lestat once more invokes this moral duality and desire to be the hero of the story while expressing an honest fault with the readers. It is reinforced again in The Vampire Chronicles tenth novel, Blood Canticle, where Lestat states, “I want to be a saint […] I want to save souls by the millions” (Rice, Blood Canticle 3).

Martin Wood argues this shift helps to humanize the vampires, by “reinforcing the sense that real evil is in the human self” (Wood 67). These vampires are not ancient relics of the past hiding in the dark corners of the world. They live in the present, telling their stories on a human level, describing their tales of loss, love, triumph, despair, and the desire to fit into a world which, in other stories, have labeled them eternal outsiders. They are not the loathsome monsters of past myths but are instead, “breathtakingly attractive” and, perhaps most importantly, they are “protagonists with whom the readers sympathize” (Wood 67). It is this sympathy which emotionally connects the reader to the vampire protagonist and differentiates Rice’s vampires from their predecessors.

The Vampire Family

Rice’s work also challenged the archetypical vampiric figure in another way: the image of the vampire as an individual, isolated figure. Where vampires of the past were frequently found alone in desolate, sparsely populated locations, such as Dracula’s castle and actively avoided by the majority of villagers (Stoker). Contrasting this view, Rice creates family units and traditions around her vampire characters. Through this use of the family, Rice is able to show her characters in the roles of lovers, parents, and children. The exact nature of these familial relationships often remain fluid, shifting between various characters through the series, which spans a nearly six thousand-year period.

The first example of this shift of the vampire from loner to member of a family unit exists in Interview with the Vampire, with the beginning set in the year 1791 (Rice, Interview with the Vampire pt. 1). In the novel, the vampires Lestat, Louis, and child-vampire, Claudia, live together as a family unit for approximately sixty years. Within this family unit, Louis and Lestat act as parents to their child-vampire protégé. They raise Claudia in these parental roles, ensuring that she is properly educated in a traditional sense (teaching her to read, play the piano, etc.) and learns the proper manners and etiquette expected for a young lady of the time period. The two “parents” also instruct her on how to be a vampire in the world of humans; lessons such as never drinking the blood of the dead, getting rid of bodies, and how to lure in her prey (Rice, Interview with the Vampire pt. 1). Claudia’s approach to luring human prey in order to drain them of their blood involves extensive use of deception, as her child-like form lacks the full strength of an adult vampire. However, through manipulation and playing the part of a child, Claudia proves just as lethal and effective a killer in her own right. Over time, the permanence of these roles is ultimately their undoing, as Claudia grows restless and resentful over the gradual realization that she shall never obtain the form of an adult woman, trapping her perpetually in the role of the child. Her ongoing anger causes her to lash out against Lestat, ultimately causing a rift which breaks apart the family unit her vampire “parents” strived to maintain (Rice, Interview with the Vampire pt. 1).

Family connections are highlighted throughout the series; however the relationship between a vampire and the one who turned them (their sire or maker) is often presented in as complex in nature. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, Dracula is presented as a largely isolated figure, with the exception of three female companions. John Allen Stevenson’s states in A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula that Stoker’s text “does not explicitly define the women’s relation to Dracula” (Stevenson 143). This lack of a definition leaves scholars with differing opinions as to the nature of the relationship between Dracula and the three woman in question. Some, such as Christopher Craft, consider these woman to be Dracula’s daughters (Craft 110). Others, such as Leonard Wolf, call them Dracula’s brides, while C.F. Bentley states they are either his “daughters or his sisters” (Wolf 249; Bentley 29).

Speaking of a new bride Dracula seeks to claim, a mortal woman named Mina. Dracula explains that through transformation, Mina will become “flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful-wine press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and helper” (Stoker ch. XXI). Stevenson points out that through Dracula’s admission, and as the process of vampiric transformation, that:

[n]ot only do vampires combine feeding with reproduction, they collapse the distinction between sexual partners and offspring. “Wives,” that is, become daughters in an extraordinarily condensed procedure in which penetration, intercourse, conception, gestation, and parturition represent not discrete stages, but one undifferentiated action. (Stevenson 143)

Dracula, through a penetrating bite of his fangs and an exchange of bodily fluids, in this case, blood, transforms women in his own image, that of the vampire. Thus, the woman fulfills the role of both lover and offspring in the act of transformation.

Anne Rice further blurs the lines concerning vampire maker and fledgling in The Vampire Lestat (Rice, Vampire Lestat). The novel delves further into the past of the title vampire and introduces the reader to Lestat’s mortal family. While multiple characters are introduced, the character of greatest importance to the vampire family dynamic is Gabrielle de Lioncourt, Lestat’s mortal mother, whom Lestat chooses to transform into a vampire (Rice, Vampire Lestat pt. III).

Similar to Dracula, transformation in Rice’s novels takes place through an exchange of blood. The vampire drains a mortal almost to the point of death and then allows the mortal to drink the vampire’s blood. This blood prompts the human to experience the death of their mortal body and is, in a sense, reborn as a vampire. Where Gabrielle is concerned, this dynamic creates an inversion to the typical family relationship. By transforming Gabrielle, Lestat becomes a vampire progenitor of his biological mother; in essence, Lestat turns his mortal mother into his vampire daughter.

Rice’s emphasis on family extends to additional vampire characters within The Vampire Chronicles. The novel The Queen of the Damned introduces the vampires Maharet and Mekare (Rice, Queen of the Damned). Twin sisters by mortal birth, the pair were transformed within minutes of each other, and their relationship plays a pivotal role throughout The Vampire Chronicles. Additionally one of the twins, Maharet, bears a child prior to her transformation. Over nearly six thousand years, Maharet follows her descendants, maintaining a watchful eye over her human family line and continually emphasizing the importance of family bonds throughout the story. Eventually, Maharet transforms one of those descendants, a young woman named Jesse. This adds an additional complexity to the family line, as Jesse is both distant descendant with six thousand years of generations between them, into a direct vampire daughter, born of Maharet’s own blood (Rice, Queen of the Damned).

This idea of a vampire family continually grows and adds new members throughout the series. In The Vampire Armand, it is revealed that Armand was transformed by the vampire, Marius (Rice, The Vampire Armand). Meeting Armand as a young man and engaged in a physically intimate relationship with him before transforming into a vampire. Armand then, in turn, transforms Daniel, a young man who interviewed Lestat in the first book of the series, Interview with the Vampire. Lestat befriends a man named David in The Tale of the Body Thief. David resists Lestat’s attempts to transform him, resulting in Lestat forcing David to accept his vampiric blood through the use of brute force (Rice, Body Thief, 425–427). However, David later forgives Lestat, resulting in David becoming another member of the vampire family.

Through their various connections of sire and fledgling, this family tree expands and grows in a complex web, redefining and skewing the idea of the solitary vampire completely. The first novel in The Vampire Chronicles, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976 (Rice, Interview with the Vampire). The last novel, Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat, was published in 2018 (Rice, Blood Communion). Over 13 novels in the series, an additional two novels published under the series title New Tales of the Vampires, Anne Rice builds a vampire family, filled with complex and intricate relationships between her characters as they shift between roles of lovers, parents, children, siblings, and other complex roles (Rice, Pandora and Vittorio). These bridges and familial relationships built between characters helped to shift the depiction of “humans as comrades, the vampire as loner” (Wood 60). Just as Anne Rice’s books form a series, the characters within built a bridge of families and friendships, showing the vampire as part of an active community which care for and protect each other. This allows the vampire to be seen as father, child, friend, and love, differentiating from vampire characters of the past who were viewed as a “single-minded personification of evil” (Wood 60–61).

Death and Decay

Rice also changed the archetype of the vampire significantly through the use of physical description. Rice removes her vampires from locations associated with death and decay, and changes the vampires in turn. Lestat “stalk[s] the world in mortal dress – the worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else” (Rice, Vampire Lestat 228). Lestat lacks the decrepit features often association with vampires such as Dracula, who is described as possessing an aquiline face:

with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, […] was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips […] For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. (Stoker ch. II)

This description includes details which mark Dracula as “other” from his pointed ears to his “sharp white teeth” protruding over his lips (Stoker ch. II). The paleness of Dracula’s complexion also implies an unnatural or sickly appearance. His hands are also described as “rather coarse—broad, with squat fingers” with “hairs in the centre of the palm (Stoker ch. II). The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point” (Stoker ch. II). The protagonists note the strangeness, almost animalistic nature of the coarse hands with unusually long nails; something off-putting and inhuman. Dracula’s breath furthers the image of decay, described as “rank” (Stoker ch. II).

These aspects are also seen in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Nosferautu). In The New York Times article “Critic’s Notebook; ‘Nosferatu,’ the Father of All Horror Movies,” Caryn James describes the vampire Nosferatu as:

positively ratlike. He has a bald head, pointy ears, elongated hands with clawlike nails and two conspicuous fangs where his front teeth should be. His pasty-white coffin pallor hints at too many days out of the sun, and he walks stiff-armed and hunched over, like an animal not quite used to standing on his hind legs. This guy is no cutie face. (James)

In comparison to these classic vampire portrayals, Lestat is described as possessing a, “full and beautiful blond hair, sharp blue eyes, razzle-dazzle clothes, an irresistible smile, and a well-proportioned body six feet in height that can, in spite of its two hundred years, pass for that of a twenty-year-old mortal” (Rice, Body Thief). This image paints a picture of a handsome creature, possessing an attractive appearance, or as Anne Rice additionally describes him, the vampire who, “stalk[s] the world in mortal dress – the worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else” (Rice, Vampire Lestat 229). Rice’s vampires combination of attractive physical features combined with his ability to blend in with the mortal population in cities including but not limited to New Orleans, Paris, Venice, and many more separates him from vampires of the past.

Satan Versus the Heroic Vampire

Without teenage me reading @AnneRiceAuthor book, Interview with the Vampire, the Anita Black series might not exist. That book read at that time was a foundation book for me. So sorry to hear of her passing. – Laurell K. Hamilton, New York Times bestselling author (Laurell K. Hamilton)

Another traditional trope of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vampire texts Rice is quick to address is the idea that vampires are satanic, not resulting from their actions or choices, but by their very nature. In stories from Dracula to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, vampires are threatened by symbols of the Christian God (Stoker; Stephen King). Traditional rules dictate that vampires should turn away from the Christian crucifix and that holy water can burn a vampire’s skin like acid. In most traditional stories, the vampire lacks a reflection in mirror, “which indicates the absence of a Christian soul” (Gomez 87). These and several other long-standing beliefs surrounding the religious elements of the vampire myth are dispelled by Rice as common misconceptions in the form of a question-answer session between the vampire Louis and the man interviewing him, referred to only as “the boy” until later books when he is identified as Daniel Molloy (Rice, Interview with the Vampire 3 and Rice, Queen of the Damned pt. I.4).

When the boy inquires into Louis’ ability to touch a crucifix, Louis replies that the notion he cannot is “nonsense” and informs the boy that he “rather likes looking on crucifixes in particular” (Rice, Interview with the Vampire 23). Later in the novel, Louis actually enters a church, seemingly in search of God’s presence. He finds himself disappointed, coming to the realization that, “God did not live in this church […] I was the only supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof!” (Rice, Interview with the Vampire 144). This sentiment is later echoed by Lestat in The Vampire Lestat, when he enters a church for the first time after becoming a vampire and concludes, “there was no power here” (Rice, Vampire Lestat 113). Interview with the Vampire takes this lack of power a step farther when Louis attempts to confess his sins to a priest. When the priest refuses to believe his story, Louis attacks the priest in an event he describes to the boy.

He was cursing me, calling on God at the altar. And then I grabbed him on the very steps to the Communion rail and pulled him down to face me there and sank my teeth into his neck. (Rice, Interview with the Vampire 147)

This confession shows that even a man of the religious cloth is no longer safe from the bite of the vampire.

In The Vampire Defanged, Susannah Clements argues that there exists two key components which contribute to the shift of the vampire from villain to hero (Clements 33–56). The first component is the removal of the church’s power over the vampire. The second is the sense of guilt that Rice bestows upon her characters. As one reads The Vampire Chronicles, it cannot be denied that Rice’s creations are “spiritual beings,” who themselves struggle with the idea that they can enter a church or attack a man of the cloth without a form of celestial repercussion (Clements 34). They experience guilt over everything from killing members of the mortal population of which they were once a part, to harming and betraying those they hold most dear, to the loss of the family and friends they once knew.

The questions of heaven and hell and life and death are very personal to Rice as she moves through The Vampire Chronicles. Rice depicts this struggle with spirituality and morality throughout the series, notably in the battle between a secular moral code embraced, perhaps most firmly, by the character of Marius. This struggle is also portrayed in the moral religious views of characters like Louis and Lestat, characters searching for answers to their own spiritual questions. These stand as a reflection of Rice’s own personal religious journey. Born a Catholic, Anne Rice began struggling with her beliefs during her early college years and at the age of eighteen, would make the decision to abandon the Catholic Church along with her belief in the existence of God. This transition occurred during a talk with her priest when Anne Rice was informed that questioning her faith and the power of the Catholic Church would lead her to misery (Ramsland 66). Hearing these words, Rice would later state:

something in me revolted. I didn’t argue with him. But I was no longer a Catholic when I left the room. […] he had hit on something which I couldn’t abide-the idea that my upbringing condemned me to be a Catholic forever, no matter what my heart and conscience told me was true. (Rice, Called Out of Darkness 123)

She would later marry Stan Rice, who was also an atheist, and would remain estranged from her Catholic faith for the next thirty-eight years.

The first novel in The Vampire Chronicles follows Louis, tormented by his loss of humanity and his struggle to understand his purpose in the world. He roams throughout the centuries searching for answers as to the existence of God and is tormented at finding so few. In contrast, the vampire who created him, Lestat, is a strong, confident character who thrives in life and claims that he cares not for the answers Louis seeks. Rice would inform her readers that originally, Louis was a representation of herself, while Lestat was based upon her husband’s more confident atheist views. That Lestat was in fact:

Stan the atheist saying to me, Louis the Catholic, what do you need all of that crap for? Live, look at life around you, reach for it, you’ve got it all! Don’t mourn for a system that may never have existed, or a religion that’s dead, or go looking for God and the Devil to justify things. Look at what’s right before you. (Riley 16)

Despite this, as The Vampire Chronicles moved forward, Rice’s identification with her characters would shift. Rice would transition from associating herself with Louis and begin to associate with Lestat. Much like Rice, Lestat has an affair with religion as a child, at one point hoping to enter the monastery. Also like Rice, Lestat eventually comes to reject these ideas of religion and embraces the life of a vampire. Lestat declares:

The Christian god was dead […] And no mythological religion had arisen to take the place of the old. On the contrary, the simplest people of this age were driven by a vigorous secular morality as strong as any religious morality I had ever known. (Rice, Vampire Lestat 9)

This idea of a “vigorous secular morality” is embraced by characters such as Lestat and used by Rice to implement the moral code which Rice’s vampires struggle to uphold throughout The Vampire Chronicles (Rice, Vampire Lestat 9).

This blurring of moral lines between the satanic and the angelic, good and evil, religious and secular, all serve to cast the vampire in a new, more complex light. Rather than the single-minded, personification of evil and villainy, the vampire was a flawed character in search of many of the answers readers themselves sought. In Maria Nikolajeva’s essay, “Fairy Tale and Fantasy: From Archaic to Postmodern,” Nikolajeva states that the modern protagonist “often lacks hero features, can be scared and even reluctant to perform the task, and can sometimes fail” (Nikolajeva 140). Lestat meets this definition of the modern protagonist quite well, acting as an example of the genre’s faltering distinction between the heroic and the villainous.

Lestat achieves this through a variety of means. Though he frequently professes to be a hero in Rice’s novels, from declaring himself one in The Tale of the Body Thief, to stating his desire to “save souls by the millions” in Blood Canticle, Lestat’s actions are often those of a villain, exploring the darker aspects of his character and reflecting its duality (Rice, Body Thief 2 and Blood Canticle 3). For example, in The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is tricked into trading his vampiric form for a mortal one. In order to regain his own body, Lestat must face off against the body thief, enlisting the help of David, an elderly man whose life has been devoted to the study of the supernatural. During the battle, Lestat defeats the body thief, but through a series of unplanned events, David’s consciousness is transferred to the body of a much younger man. Toward the end of the novel, the story appears complete. It is here that Rice allows Lestat to delve into the more villainous aspects of his character as he issues his readers a warning:

the book should be ended. It really should have ended when I lit that small candle, but it didn’t. […] Pray continue to Chapter Twenty-three to discover what happened next. Or you can quit now, if you like. You may come to wish that you had. (Rice, Body Thief 411)

The story then continues with Lestat visiting David in his new, younger form and offering to transform David into a vampire. David refuses, but Lestat is unwilling to accept this rebuff, and forces the vampiric transformation, referred to by Rice as the “dark gift.” Once transformed, David demands to know why Lestat refused to honor David’s wishes to remain human. Lestat responds by simply stating, “I did it because I wanted to do it. […] Because I wanted to see what would happen if I did it, I wanted to” (Rice, Body Thief 427). An answer which shows that, in spite of Lestat’s claim for heroics, he ultimately choose to make a selfish ending to the novel, changing his friend simply because he could and ignoring the express and plainly stated desires of David to refuse. Given some of the questions posed by Rice regarding the nature of the vampire’s soul, it is possible to see Lestat’s actions as not only selfish, but truly evil, potentially damning his friend out of pettiness and spite.

In the tenth novel of the series, Blood Canticle, Lestat again has a chance to take a step toward both the position of selflessness and heroism, when another vampire pleads with him to transform a young woman, Mona Mayfair, into a vampire. Lestat agrees to turn her, telling the reader that he was aware what it offers is “darkness eternal,” and knowing by turning her he is refusing to “give her over to the angels” he knows are waiting (Rice, Blood Canticle 34). When the transformation is complete, Lestat states he has “murdered her soul” and “bound her to the Earth,” separating her forever from the light of heaven (Rice, Blood Canticle 42).

This declaration that turning Mona will separate her from heaven, and the salvation Lestat has come to believe awaits her, demonstrates, in Rice’s own words, “his failure to ever be anything but a rambunctious reprobate and Byronic sinner” (Rice, Called Out f Darkness 207–208). At the end of Blood Canticle, Lestat’s final words to the reader instruct them to, “[b]e gone from me, oh mortals who are pure of heart. Be gone from my thoughts, oh souls that dream great dreams. Be gone from me, all hymns of glory. I am a magnet for the damned” (Rice, Blood Canticle 392). It was at this point, in 2003, where the vampire Lestat, who Anne Rice frequently called the “the voice of [her] soul” throughout the novels, “resigned himself as the hero of the books that had given him life” (Rice, Called Out of Darkness 207–208). Readers were left with an image of a vampire who will go on as he always has, feeding upon the blood of the evil-doer and haunting the underground forevermore, trapped in the dark where he began. He never receives redemption. He is, at the end of the tale, a vampire and it is a nature that he cannot escape.

This idea was supported by Rice when, in a 2008 address, she informed her readers:

I can’t go back to the vampires and redeem them. I can’t bring them into this world where I now live, where the sun shines, literally and where the light of Christ shines. […] But they are very, very dear to my heart. […] I am not renouncing those books. I am not apologizing for them and I never will. (From Anne Rice: A Message to Fans)

Rice appeared no more capable of saving Lestat than Lestat was capable of saving himself. It seems that in the end, his heroics did not matter. He is a two-hundred-year-old vampire and beyond the grace of redemption.

Anne Rice used the vampires’ religious struggles in her works as a reflection of her own religious questions and doubts. Anne Rice was born into a Catholic family, attended Catholic schools as a child, and considered herself to be Catholic until the age of eighteen (Rice, Called Out of Darkness 123). However, in 1998, Anne Rice returned to the Catholic beliefs of her childhood (Rice, Called Out of Darkness 179). She informs her readers that her return to the Catholic Church was a gradual process and openly admits that her search for religious beliefs lies reflected in the latter half of The Vampire Chronicles. Rice says in her own words:

My own writing took me again and again and again to God. In The Vampire Armand, the talk of the Incarnation of Christ is relentless. Blood and Gold was obsessed with the tension between kinds of religious fervor. The broken heart of Pandora has to do with the character’s loss of all sense of the religious – her capitulation, under pressure, to living in a godless world. (Rice, Called Out of Darkness 176)

Perhaps the most significant of these explorations exists in the novel, Memnoch the Devil, where Lestat is taken on a tour of heaven and hell, and stands witness to the crucifixion of Christ (Rice, Memnoch the Devil). It is important to consider these religious explorations throughout The Vampire Chronicles as Rice’s choice to stop writing about the world of the vampire came hand in hand with her return to the Catholic Church. Rice felt that writing tales about “metaphorical beings shut out of salvation” no longer reflected her beliefs (Rice, Called Out of Darkness 198–199). She experienced a great calling to write more about her relationship with God and because of these feelings she drew The Vampire Chronicles to a close in 2002, vowing from that point forward to become “a writer for Christ” (Rice, Called Out of Darkness 208).

Anne Rice would go on to write five books between 2002 and 2010, departing from the vampire and adopting more Christian themes. These include two novels about angels who offer an assassin a chance at redemption; two fictional accounts about the life of Jesus Christ, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana; and an autobiographical writing, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, containing the story of Rice’s religious life as she traveled from Catholicism, to atheism, and back to the Catholic Church. In each of these stories, Rice keeps her vow and explores her relationship to God through her works creating characters, though still existing within a supernatural realm, that have the chance at redemption, a chance which her vampires never had.

However, in 2010, Rice experienced another change of heart, denouncing the Catholic Church as “flat-out immoral” (Brockers). She again abandoned her Catholic faith, no longer willing to support the Catholic church’s more conservative beliefs. Rice again turned back to the world of the supernatural, exploring the realm of the vampire’s equally dark and mythical cousin: the werewolf. In this new novel, The Wolf Gift, Anne Rice returns to her classical style of heroes, from the main protagonist, Reuben, a young man living in present-day California who befalls the bite of the werewolf, to the ancient Margon, a werewolf who, like Lestat’s mentor Marius, predates the Christian faith from which is born the modern sense of good and evil (Rice, Wolf Gift).

When discussing the nature of evil among themselves, the reader is given a disturbing conclusion that “evil is a matter of context” (Rice, Wolf Gift 392). This statement is supported throughout the novel as the werewolf, or “morphenkinder” as Rice refers to them, are revealed to have a sixth sense which allows them to literally sniff out evil. When the morphenkinder smell this evil, they are compelled to follow the scent to its source where they proceed to destroy the wicked by tearing their prey limb from limb. However, even this apparently polar image of good and evil is skewed when it is revealed near the end of the novel that this sixth sense is controlled by the werewolf’s individual sense of morality. Additionally, werewolves have no smell and thus cannot be determined even by each other to be good or evil, leaving the werewolves, much like her vampires, as mortals ambiguous creatures which must be judged on individual acts, instead of allowing readers to make an assumption based on the simple fact that they are supernatural creatures.

Lestat’s Return

Shifting forward to October of 2013, Anne Rice announced her return to the world of vampires. A year later on October 28, 2014, Prince Lestat was released, reacquainting readers with the vampire Lestat and the vampire family Rice had spent decades creating (Rice, Prince Lestat). The book would be followed in 2016 by Prince Lestat in the Realms of Atlantis and 2018’s Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat. These three novels were both a continuation of Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles but was also considered a trilogy unto themselves (Boyer). In these three books, Rice’s vampires are given a new life, bringing them into the twenty-first century.

In the new trilogy, it appears that Rice, with her renewed abandonment of the Catholic faith, is able to grant her vampires the ending, and the family, she struggled to reconcile granting them in the first ten novels. Where book ten, published in 2013, left the reader with the lone figure of the vampire Lestat proclaiming his inability to be anything but a “magnet for the damned,” in her 2018 publication of Blood Communion, readers are shown a far different image (Rice, Blood Canticle 392).

In the last novel of Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat faces a powerful enemy, the Rhoshamandes. In order to defeat him, Lestat commits a selfless act. In the words of Lestat’s friend and fellow vampire, Marius, Lestat was willing to die for others. “You gave yourself over into his hands…and you disarmed him and destroyed him. […] No blood drinker in our dark history of six thousand years has ever done such a thing” (Rice, Blood Communion ch. 26). As noted throughout this paper, in numerous instances throughout The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat expressed his dreams of becoming a hero, yet he continually failed to achieve this dream. In these last three books, written between 2014 and 2018, Lestat, at last, commits an act worthy of heroism, while Anne Rice, after 42 years and 13 novels, finally creates a hero from a creature forged of villains.

This sentiment was confirmed by Rice in a personal interview in 2015 in New Orleans, when the question was raised as to whether Rice intended for Lestat to be a hero or a villain. In response, Rice stated that Lestat was, without any doubt in her mind, “a hero” (Bone). A status which, perhaps above all other, separates Lestat from the vampires who proceeded him.

Anne Rice passed way on December 11, 2021 (Carris). Her legacy and contributions to vampire literature and lore have left a lasting impact on the figure of the vampire. Whether seen in literature, film, or television, the vampire is no longer a solitary figure in desolate isolation whose only role is that of the villain. Instead, the vampire, through changes implemented by Rice, has transformed into a character capable of love, friendship, and heroism which will influence authors for generations to come.

Cross-References