Interview with the Vampire

Fortieth anniversary edition.

From the number one New York Times best-selling author.

The time is now.

We are in a small room with the vampire, face-to-face, as he speaks – as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first 200 years as one of the living dead…

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently…carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir – young, romantic, cultivated – to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the “endless”, life…learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings…to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: The detachment, the hardened will, the “superior” sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him…

We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire – all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child – and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: Delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court…night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death – a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below…