Interview With the Vampire

Interview With the Vampire is a 1976 novel by Anne Rice. It tells the story of Louis de Pointe du Lac and his experiences after he becomes a vampire in 1791. Louis’s dissatisfaction with his mortal life extends into his immortal life, allowing Rice to explore themes of morality, love, loyalty, and immortality. This guide references the 2010 Ballantine Books eBook.

Content Warning: This guide references the book’s discussion of suicide.

Plot Summary

When the novel begins, Louis is talking to a reporter known as “the boy.” He wants to tell the story of his life, hoping that it will serve as a cautionary tale for anyone who might hear it. He tells the boy after his brother died of a tragic fall, a vampire named Lestat killed Louis and turned him into a vampire by feeding him blood from his own wrist. The two live together on Louis’s plantation, but he and Lestat have a complicated relationship. There are aspects of Louis’s vampiric life that fill him with awe, but the melancholy and passivity that were always there are amplified by immortality. He soon grows to resent Lestat. He does not view eternal life as a gift and worries that Lestat has no more answers about existential questions than he does.

A revolt by the suspicious enslaved people forces them to flee the plantation. They burn the property to hide any traces of their activities. Soon, Louis is thinking of separating from Lestat. To manipulate him into staying, Lestat changes a five-year-old girl, Claudia, into a vampire after her mother dies of the plague. Claudia proves to be a quick study, who loves to hunt and kill. However, she grows bitter as she ages, realizing that she will always have a child’s body. She and Lestat quickly tire of each other, and Claudia devises a plan to kill him with Louis’s help. She tricks him into drinking from a dead body and then slits his throat as the poison of the dead blood courses through him.

Louis and Claudia go to Europe to search for more vampires. In the oldest part of the continent, they find “primitive” vampires called “revenants,” who are little more than animated corpses with appetites. However, in Paris, they meet an old vampire named Armand, who leads a theater group in the Theatre des Vampires. He and Louis share an instant attraction, though Claudia despises Armand and his group of vampires immediately.

Lestat reaches Paris and tells Armand that Claudia tried to kill him, which is a cardinal sin among vampires. As punishment, Armand’s vampires lock Claudia and Madeleine—a doll maker who Louis turned into a vampire as a companion for Claudia—in an open-air room where the sun destroys them. In revenge, Louis locks all of the Theatre des Vampires in their coffins before burning down the theater and destroying them. Louis then travels the world with Armand, but they separate because of Louis’s apathy and aloofness in the aftermath of Claudia’s death.

At the end of the interview, the boy wants to become a vampire, and Louis feels that telling his story has been pointless. He attacks the interviewer but leaves him alive. At the novel’s conclusion, the boy is traveling to Lestat’s address in hopes of becoming immortal.