The Vampire Lestat
~ Macdonald 1987 (UK)

The Vampire Lestat
~ Knopf 1985 (US)

"If you surrender and go with her, you have surrendered to enchantment, as if in a voluptuous dream," said the Boston Globe of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Now, returning to the hypnotic world she so brilliantly created, she demonstrates once again her power to enthrall. With the same richness of drama, atmosphere and incident, she tells the fantastic story of the vampire Lestat, whom we first perceived as the seductive devil-vampire of Interview with the Vampire and whom we now follow through the ages as he searches for the origin and meaning of his own dark immortality. And who, more and more, engages our sympathy until he stands revealed as a questing romantic, a vampire-hero with his own strange and passionate courage and morality.

As the novel opens, Lestat, having risen from the earth after a fifty-five years sleep, and infatuated with the modern world, presents himself in all his vampire brilliance as a rock star, a superstar, a seducer of millions. And, in this blaze of adulation, daring to break the vampire oath of silence, he determines to tell his story, to rouse the generations of the living dead from their slumbers and to penetrate the riddle of his own existence.

As he speaks we are plunged back into eighteenth-century France, into the castle where we meet the young Lestat: child of impoverished aristocrats, heroic hunter of wolves, at odds with his tyrannical father, running away to join a traveling troupe of actors. We see him in the licentious Paris of the day, first apprentice at a boulevard theatre, then its most celebrated actor, idolised, adored by many and - night after night - watched by one... until, in a sleep filled with dreams of the wolves he killed as a boy, he is shocked awake by a dark figure and suddenly, horribly, eternally joined to the unholy brotherhood.

We follow Lestat as he searches for others like him - in churches and brothels, in gambling houses, huts and palaces - sometimes joined by the vampire-angel Gabrielle, who is bound to him both by blood and by passion; sometimes traveling with his adored Nicolas, the violinist whose music and beauty are equally transcendent. We follow Lestat as he travels from the snowcapped mountains of the Auvergne and the primeval forest of ancient Gaul to Sicily, Istanbul, Venice and Cairo, searching for his origins, sometimes finding clues to the birth of the vampire race, knowing always that the central truth eludes him.

But all the while, throughout his travels, through many lands and many times, Lestat has made enemies among his brethen - vampires who are in terror of his questions, who fear he will disturb the uneasy balance in which they exist with the mortal world, and who suspect in him a desire to rule. And when, in the caves below a craggy Greek island, in a sanctuary whose walls are covered with gold-flecked murals, the very first of the living dead awake, the truth at the heart of his quest is at last revealed. Ancient forces held immobile through the ages are irreversibly set in motion, and as the novel rushes to its stunning climax, Lestat's vampire foes converge in pursuit of him on the demonic freeways of the twentieth century.

The Vampire Lestat ~ Knopf 1985 (US)

Twenty Six Years with my Beloved Immortals ~ The Vampire Lestat

Some eight years passed between my first vampire novel and my second, and the return to the material presented me with great difficulties. Though commited from the start to using Lestat's voice, I had to find that voice, and it wasn't easy. But once I knew that Lestat would confess his life story with a smile and a bit of humour rather like a private detective in modern prose, the novel took off. Even so, it took over a year to complete the huge manuscript of The Vampire Lestat, though the last three hundred pages were written in eleven days. What an adventure!

At the outset, I had no real idea that I would fall in love with Lestat, that I would leave behind the personality of Louis as my alter ego, or really what Lestat would do next to provoke the author in me, or the reader in me.

Of all the Vampire Chronicles, The Vampire Lestat was the most difficult for me in every respect, but it is interesting to me now - in fact, more than interesting - that many readers say that this book is their favourite of all the Chronicles. It's not my favourite, but I'll get to that later. I love it, like I love all my books, but it's a far better portrait of a character than it is a good story. If you read this book, it's for the love of Lestat and no other reason.

Anne Rice

The title of the second Vampire Chronicle, which details Lestat's transformation into a vampire and his consequent quest and adventures.

When Rice first contemplated her sequel to Interview with the Vampire (as early as 1982), she included a female character named Sandra, who worked at the radio station with the boy reporter (named David, who later became Daniel). David had disappeared, so Sandra went to New Orleans to find the house that Louis mentioned in the tapes. She located it and found herself enchanted by a weakened Lestat, who gradually grew stronger with her help. They fell in l0ve and Sandra became a vampire. Rice eventually wrote a different story.

"I knew when I finished Interview with the Vampire," says Rice, "that I wanted to write a sequel, but I wasn't ready. It took me a long time to get back to those characters and to feel that I had anything to say. When I wrote the first book I was Louis. When I wrote the second one I was Lestat. I was going back and rewriting the first one in a much fuller way."

The second Chronicle is inspired by Lestat's emergence into the 1980s and his subsequent discovery that Louis has published their story via a reporter. Lestat feels that Louis distorted what happpened, and did not really know the whole story. He tells his side to set the record straight, to show how much more there is to being a vampire than Louis was able to convey.

The Vampire Lestat was a difficult book for Rice to write, "It was very had to get into. I never found a way to compress Lestat's childhood into a tight form. I was never satisfied with the descriptions of the village and his life there, or even of Magnus or the tower. The 'Devil's Road' chapter, where Lestat goes all over Europe, was one of the hardest to write, I broke off the novel at that chapter and didn't resume until a year later. It was an utterly defeating chapter. It just drove me crazy." Eventually she found the voice she wanted to use for Lestat by developing a similar voice for the male character, Elliot, in Exit to Eden, an erotic contemporary novel. This helped her to break through her block.

The chronological tale of Lestat's life, taking place over a decade before the events in Louis story, goes as follows. As a young man Lestat escapes the poverty of his ancestral home and finds fame in Paris as an actor. His courage and beauty attract the vampire Magnus, who forces the Dark Gift on Lestat, then abandons him. Lestat manages to deal with this dramatic change in his existance, and even flourishes with it. He then makes his mother, Gabrielle, and his best friend Nicholas, into vampires. He also scatters a coven in Paris run by Armand, and goes off in search of a mentor, Marius.

After ten years, Lestat meets Marius and learns about how the vampire race got its start in Egypt. He is shown Enkil and Akasha, the king and queen, who silently and catatonically preserve the vampire spirit in their own bodies and thus must be kept safe. Lestat awakens the queen, Akasha, and they drink from each other until Enkil forces them apart. Marius then sends Lestat away for his own protection. Lestat ends up in New Orleans, where he spots Louis and makes him, then Claudia, into vampires. A brief chapter offers his version of the events surrounding his life with Louis and Claudia, Claudia's subsequent attack on him, and his recovery. He then offers his perspective about being a vampire through the publication of VL, and prepares for his rock concert. Louis who has been estranged from him, joins him, fearful that other vampires, who resent the way Lestat has publicised them all, will destroy Lestat. Yet Lestat performs his concert without a hitch, and the novel ends when Akasha, awakened by Lestat's music, abducts him. The book is left unfinished and requires a sequel.

That sequel is QD, in which the publication of VL plays a significant part. VL's in bookstores angers most vampires, and also spawns a new vocabulary and awareness for vampire covens. The book is denigrated in the declaration that is written on a wall in the vampire bar in San Francisco. Khayman sums up VL's theme as, "And this and this and this, and means nothing."

More significantly, however, the publication of VL results in one character becoming a vampire. After she has already investigated Lestat and Louis from what Louis provided in IV, Jesse reads VL and decides that Lestat can provide answers for the mysteries in her own life. Through Lestat's autobiography, she learns about her friends, Mael and Santino, and recognises that her aunt Maharet may be a vampire too. The book even makes Jesse recall a repressed memory of having seen Mael and Maharet in their daytime, deathlike sleep. She goes to the concert and is fatally injured, so Maharet makes her a vampire.

In BT, Lestat refers to VL by name, and cites images in dreams that are from his mortal boyhood before he killled the wolves. These dreams feed into a sense of despair that sends him into the desert to expose himself to the sun.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland