The Vampire Chronicles #2: The Vampire Lestat

Interview with a vampire charmed me so much that I decided to read the second volume almost immediately. And even if everything is perfectly coherent with the universe we discovered in the first volume, the experience is quite different in The Vampire Lestat. The subtitle should have been: The world of vampires: Continuities and ruptures. (That's an inside joke, sorry if it's not funny.)

Summary

WhileInterview with a vampire is fascinating and slightly nightmarish, The Vampire Lestat is epic. Lestat, who was portrayed to us in the first volume as a rather heartless vampire, takes on considerably more depth. We follow him from his childhood, a miserable childhood in a cold castle, with a brilliant but emotionally absent mother and a barely noteworthy father and brothers who forbade him to educate himself. We see him running away for a better life and being forced back home, meeting his great friend (love?) Nicolas with whom he goes to Paris to become an actor, and then his violent transformation into a vampire by a stranger who, the very next day, throws himself into the fire before his eyes. We understand why Louis found him hateful in the first volume. Then, we follow him in his quest for the truth: he wants to understand where he comes from and if creatures of the night like him live for a reason, which leads him to travel the world and to pursue one of the oldest vampires on Earth.

So not only does Lestat have some amazing adventures before and after his transformation, but he also learns the secret of how vampires are created. And that's particularly exciting: I was caught up in the game, I felt like I was one of the few chosen ones to know a secret that is thousands of years old. The book itself, the one we read, has a history: it is supposedly written by Lestat in a revolutionary and extremely dangerous attempt.

Impressions

In the end, The Vampire Lestat follows the same vein asInterview with a vampire : the boundaries of good and evil become blurred. After all, before their transformation, vampires were humans like you and me, which makes these books more than just fantasy novels. In my case, they push a reflection on death that I rarely get in real life.

With this series, Anne Rice succeeded in creating page-turners with entire books, that is to say that as soon as you finish one volume, you want to read the next one. I was only allowed to taste the pleasure of discovering secrets as old as the world: if I really want to understand the creatures that terrorize poor mortals at night, I have to continue. I almost forget that it's all fiction.