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Book Review of Interview with the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles, Bk 1)

Interview with the Vampire (Vampire Chronicles, Bk 1)
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Classic, February 21, 2006
Reviewer: Moonshine69 (Arizona)

This story is a sensual and incredibly disturbing fantasy expressed with powerful emotional eroticism, beauty, and eloquence. Rice transforms vampires into sympathetic, seductive, and human figures ... in search of others like themselves. Rice explores humanity's deepest philosophical concerns, including the nature of good and evil, death, the conflict between reality and idealism, and how do we know that we know, and all that from the fascinating perspective of an immortal narrator.

Louis is a classic tragic character whose source of suffering results from his inability to release his lingering humanity. Lestat is twisted, cold, and a deviate. But it is the story of the little girl, Claudia, that I find the most intriguing. She becomes a vampire at an age too young to remember her human nature and transforms into a vampire woman inside the body of child. It is this doomed tragedy of Claudia, with all of its problematic complications that lends a classic power to this book.

Rice makes no effort to hide the vampire's erotic appeal behind any doors of moral convention. Moreover, her subjects are far from evil incarnate. The characters are complex in a human way that transcends good and evil. Rice conveys great depth to her characters that live in the abject where there is no good or evil but lots of disturbing possibilities.