Oh Lestat de Lioncourt, how can you be this rebel, how dare you create such trouble while not giving a single thought to your actions.This is the second book on The Vampire Chronicles, and it is time for Lestat to tell his story. It starts in the year 1984 if my mind is not playing tricks on me, (wow, i just realized that i was reading this book at the same time with the book 1984. Isn't that weird? book set in 1984 while i was reading 1984... no?... but... are you sure?... not even a little?... well i... whatever, i think it's interesting :P)and Lestat has become a rockstar in a band called precisely "The Vampire Lestat". This idea of a vampire becoming a rockstar seems a bit ridiculous to me at the beginning because during all the time in Interview with the Vampire they were saying Lestat was very handsome and crazy, so to define him later as an actual rockstar seemed a bit of a tool to trick people into thinking he's way cooler than he actually is, it didn't seem like a good idea to me.I couldn't help but imagine him on stage playing guitar and being stalked by millions of fans while, in his nature, he's supposed to be killing to feed, not just being cool and famous and... rockstar... (at this point it wouldn't have surprise me if he started to "sparkle" :S) And he actually sings, he goes onstage and starts singing things like "I'm a vampire, and I'll suck your blood" and other things.So I didn't like that, but luckily this didn't appear much in the book because for almost the entirety of the book Lestat was writing his story. Basically after the interview with Louis, the boy interviewer published the interview as a book which became a best seller, but everybody thought it was a work of fiction not a real thing. Lestat came across this book when he met the guys of the band and wanted to join them, he went to them and told them he was Lestat and got very surprised to realize that they already knew his name. They thought it was really awesome that he came to them and told them he was Lestat from the book interview instead of other famous vampires like Dracula for example. So He read greedily the book and thought he needed to tell his own story, so he typed it all from the beginning when he was turned into one of the damned creatures.His story was really interesting, it covered way too many details of many things, hence the book is long. I really liked especially when other vampires told him a bit of their back story, more specifically Marius. Marius is a very old vampire, he is the vampire who created Armand, and his story is so damn interesting, i wish i could read more about him. Since he is a very old vampire, his beginnings come from a very old age and you see historical facts here of ancient history, it's really fantastic!! All the chapters about Marius are my favorite parts of the book. In this part he also covered the way vampires started to exist in this world, Marius was not one of the first vampires but he sure knows which 2 were the first ones to appear and they are called The Father and The Mother. Oh, i so enjoyed this part of the story, the whole book was worth it just for this part!I also like so much all the philosophy it contains about death, life, existence, love, immortality, etc. Anne Rice is a great author, her prose is gorgeous, the descriptions are beautiful, but i can't bring myself to really love her books, sometimes i feel like they drag way too much and i feel the pace so slow and that makes me stop enjoying the story for a greater part of the book.At the ending (view spoiler)[ Lestat gets in trouble because he published that book revealing all the secrets of the vampires, names, locations, everything and he's there being a rockstar, exposed to the world without keeping any secrets nor respecting vampire rules. And he's brought great danger over himself and those he loves. (hide spoiler)]
(WHAT THE HELL GOODREADS WHY DID YOU DELETE MY REVIEW???) As someone who loves vampires, I've had the misfortune of never reading any decent literature concerning them thus far. There was the dreaded Twilight series, and the marginally better Blue Bloods series (well, the first two books, really), and I never even got past the first couple of pages of Dead Until Dark before tossing it aside. None of these were exactly what you'd refer to as gems of vampire literature.But then one day my friend hands me this books and tells me I have to read it, forget the fact that I haven't read Interview With a Vampire before. So I start this book, mildly curious and spurred on by my rekindled love for vampires with my Buffy rewatch. Immediately, I end up thinking it's some kind of joke because when we are introduced to Lestat, he is about to become a rockstar and I found myself thinking 'how is a rockstar vampire any better than a vampire who sparkles in the sun?'Turns out, I was wrong. Lestat was much better than a sparkly vampire. This book was full of interesting characters (I loved almost everyone we were introduced to), had wonderfully sensuous prose, and a plot that was engaging and relatively fast paced considering its length.But the real reason this book gets five stars? Lestat. God, I love him. He's a rebel, but a sensitive rebel, and not sensitive in a way that often comes off as annoying. He cares for the pleasures of mortal life even after being changed, longs for companionship and I'm pretty sure he's described feeling an inexplicably strong love for every single character he meets from Nicholas to Marius (even Akasha, I think?) It's adorable (excuse my cooing). I haven't read Interview..., or seen the move but judging him from just what we've seen in this book, Lestat is one of the most entertaining protagonists I've read in a while and is definitely going down in my list of favorite male literary characters. And the whole Rockstar thing? Hilariously fitting and pretty well executed when taken into context. I cannot do justice to this book in a review, it's difficult to explain just how brilliantly Anne Rice threads the plot together and makes her characters likable, and if not that then at least relatable, and alive despite their being technically dead. You keep wanting to revisit this world, and I think whenever I come back to re-read this book, it will be just as thrilling and enriching an experience as it was this time around. For now, I'm looking forward to reading more of this series. Still trying to decide if I should go back and read Interview... or proceed with Queen of the Damned.
What do You think about The Vampire Lestat (2004)?
Let me clear one thing up: I haven't read Queen of the Damned yet, but this book definitely increased my love for Lestat.In Interview With the Vampire, Lestat read to me as the aristocratic, realistic, practical vampire with a lust for blood and opinions grounded in blunt reality. I liked him as a villain, and I love him as a hero. Louis felt to me like a melodramatic teenager with a flair for angsty sololiquies. I don't hate him, but I don't have a passion for his character.Lestat's history is mildly disturbing, especially his flip-flopping love for his mother, but he does have flaws and personality, and that makes him interesting. He's the charming, gorgeous young man who will drink your blood, slay evildoers, play the piano, argue intelligently with a sophisticated French accent, and love his fellow vampires and mortals in a darkly honest way I love.Lestat is the neo-European vampire, graceful and deadly. Yes, his O.O Claudia incident was a mistake, but hey, no-one is perfect. And this golden-haired vampire does come close.
—Mochacocafan
This is one of those books that defined me. I don't mean that I turned goth or vampire or whatever. No... it started me thinking.I was born and raised in the South. I didn't read anything else other than fantasy novels (like Dragonlance). I joined the Marines in 89 and while watching a movie about a teenage vampire it was mentioned that Dracula is 'good literature'. I went to the base library to check out Dracula and beside it on the shelf was this book. I took this one instead.The book was great. I loved it. The book engendered a question within me that never found any sunlight growing up a protestant in the Deep South. That queston, can something evil love? The values of the Southern protestant is one of black and white and there is no mixing, no grey, no overlap. By witnessing the drama of Lestat's journey, this manifestation of the Shadow declaring it's evil and it's good... I questioned this myself. It is a slippery slope to question everything. With no reading, history, or even exposure to any philosophy (Arkansas public school after all) I now asked questions about ethics, the nature of God, what is beauty, morality, and more. I had become a philosopher (though not a good one).Now, 17 years later I've been around the world many times, am nearing the completion of two degrees (psychology and philosophy) and am a much different, much broader, much more deepened soul. The questions I've asked, the roads I've taken, the experiences I've had, are all a result of my search for my own truth. A lot of that was set afire because of reading this book. I know that many bemoan Anne's move from the supernatural and to Christian writings. It's her life and I respect that. Yet I am reminded of something Jung said, we do not become enlighted by imagining beings of light, but by making the darkness visible (I'm paraphrasing). Lestat might not be a being of light (that's another topic) but his darkness is illuminating.This is one of my favorite books ever.
—Eddie Black
In "Interview With a Vampire", Lestat was the villain, and could be viewed as a cold, unfeeling monster. In the sequel, Lestat gets a chance to 'set the record straight.' Reading HIS account on his life, and the years spent with Louis, he actually manages to gain sympathy, and he fully admits to being a brat prince of the undead, and you fall in love with this vampire who listens to Beethoven while riding a motorcycle down the moonlit streets. Lestat has an ego so large, it is little wonder that he chooses to become a rock star and write a book accounting his long life story, because where else can you find that level of admiration and worship if not from center stage, with a microphone, in front of thousands of people cheering you on like at a concert? Who else would write the book but Lestat himself? (Under the alias of Anne Rice, of course.) He proves to be so entertaining that all of the vampire books after that are told from his point of view.
—Chris
