As you may know, Interview with the Vampire is considered one of the best vampire novels since Dracula. Interview with the Vampire was written in 1976, and remains popular and beloved today. With the resurgence of vampires in contemporary fiction, Interview with the Vampire is a classic that vampire lovers can always return to.
The following are some editorial reviews of Interview with the Vampire:
- Kirkus Reviews
- “This tells the story of a gentle vampire, Louis. But a gentle vampire is a little like Ferdinand the Bull. No Bela Lugosi, Louis is lonely and melancholy after he becomes one at the age of 25, following the death of his brother. He is taken in hand (white but not so languid) by a much awfuller vampire Lestat who is vengeful by nature and unquenchably bloodthirsty. This all takes place in the moss and magnolia New Orleans of 1791 but then follows Louis’ experiences for 200 years as one of the “living dead.” In particular his love for Claudia, the youngster they vampirize. Claudia, it must be admitted, is a little demon with the face of a doll. Together they kill Lestat but a few candlelight years later Lestat is back, restored even if more wrinkled, and then they must run away–vampires can travel anywhere in satin-lined coffins–to Transylvania and then to Paris where they have all sorts of amorous and picaresque experiences with others of their own kind while Louis struggles to save Claudia and keep her from sinking her pretty little white teeth in pale pink flesh. Finally he realizes his attempt to escape evil and find love and goodness is doomed. Author Rice’s super. natural conceit is as lacy as an immortelle but then who knows what strange blooms from the night soil of legend and superstition will catch the public fancy. The word is that readers will be enrapt.” (Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1976)
Boston Globe
“If you surrender, you will find that you have surrender to enchantment, as if in a voluptuous dream.”
Chicago Tribune
“A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller. . . . Anne Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth–the education of the vampire.”
Philadelphia Inquirer
“A supernatural thriller raised to the level of literature.”
Library Journal
“Rice turned the vampire genre on its ear with this first novel (LJ 5/1/76), which evolved into one of the most popular series in recent history. Though the quality of the books has declined, this nonetheless is a marvelous, innovative, and literate tale of the longing for love and the search for redemption. This 20th-anniversary edition offers a trade-size paperback for a good price.”
Chicago Tribune
“A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller. . . . Anne Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth–the education of the vampire.”
Leo Braudy
“Anne Rice’s publishers mention the Collector and the Other, but it is really The Exorcist to which Interview with the Vampire should be compared, and both novelist William Peter Blatty and filmmaker William Friedkin, whatever their faults did it much better…The publicity tells us Rice is a “dazzling storyteller.” But there is no story here, only a series of sometimes effective but always essentially static tableaus out of Roger Corman films, and some self-conscious soliloquizing out of Spider-Man comics, all wrapped in a ballooning, pompous language.” Books of the Century, The New York Times, May, 1976
Interview with the Vampire 