Books in Brief: Interview with the Vampire

Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice (Knopf, 372 pp., $8.95). Several seasons back, when publishers, movie companies, and the media were rediscovering the supernatural and the occult, a number of Dracula-and vampire-inspired books appeared, including McNally and Florescu’s scholarly history, In Search of Dracula, and Leonard Wolf’s quirky and pretentious A Dream of Dracula. What was most conspicuous and puzzling about such volumes was the seriousness with which the authors approached their subject. Instead of having some fun with it, they tried, fruitlessly, to give it complexity and significance. That same solemnity runs through much of Anne Rice’s first novel, and it is one of the reasons why her tale of a 200-year-old vampire from Louisiana becomes tedious. Louis, the vampire narrator, relates his history with great and often unintentionally silly intensity, focusing on one blood-sucking session after another. Every so often he will record a meditative, reflective conversation between himself and an “undead” companion—his savage mentor, Lestat, or Claudia, the lovely child vampire. Somehow the high-minded, philosophical interludes contrast too sharply with the low-brow, B-movie horror. The reader is more inclined to laugh them off than to use them as guides to the metaphors possibly contained within the tale. Had we had a deeper sense of Louis, we might have been able to believe his story was as important as the author obviously does. And perhaps if the author had varied her structure and technique more, she might have avoided the deadening stylistic predictability that mars her book. Though the novel does have some effective scenes, the repeated blood-sucking quickly wearies the reader, like a vampire-oriented That’s Entertainment.