In celebration from the 40th anniversary of its publication

The time is currently.

We are in a little room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks–as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his 1st two hundred years among the living dead .

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . transporting us back to the night when he departed individual lifetime as heir–young, passionate, cultivated–to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted from the about Interview with the Vampire radiant and sinister Lestat in to the other, the ‘endless,’ life . . . learning 1st to sustain himself within the bloodstream of cocks and rats caught in the raffish roads of New Orleans, after that on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet required Lestat, he steadily embraces the behaviors, hungers, emotions of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the ‘superior’ sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial moment within a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost youngster Claudia, wanting not to harm but to comfort and ease her, struggling against the final residue of human feeling within him . . .

We see how Claudia subsequently is manufactured a vampire–all her enthusiasm and intelligence trapped forever in the torso of a small child–and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter existence of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a rock nymph in the hidden backyard court . . . evening curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the globe, thirsting for the beauty of death–a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below . . .

We see them joined up with against the envious, harmful Lestat, getting into a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, eager to find the world they belong to, the means of survival, to know what they are and just why, where they originated from, what their long term can be . . .

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact tempo with their own, steer them to the doorways from the Théâtre des Vampires–the gorgeous, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires simultaneously face mask and reveal the horror within . . . with their ending up in the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole excellent and decadent culture of vampires, an intimacy that becomes unexpected terror if they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . .

In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview using the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination from the first order.