Interview With The Vampire is a novel I greatly enjoyed. While the characters all have their flaws, there’s still so much this book has done to rationalize the emotions that people feel while in a toxic relationship. Lestat is a character who is very (in my opinion) sociopathic. He will do anything in order to get the outcome he desires. Louis is new to being a vampire, and he is portrayed as being completely unsure of is it’s even something he wants to commit to. He would rather die than live a life of immortality, but Lestat being his ‘lover’ manipulates him into staying immortal so that he isn’t lonely. This is one of the big red flags that Lestat waves in the reader’s face that he is in fact a toxic person. The entire novel goes into detail about Louis’ internal struggle with becoming an immortal creature. Is he a demon like Babette said he was? He didn’t want to take people’s lives so that he could live, but when Lestat made him a full-fledged creature of the night, he didn’t seem to have a choice. Lestat even goes to the lengths of making Louis feel guilty by turning Claudia into a vampire, thus determining the same fate as Louis to a young 5-year-old girl. So now on top of all of the internal dialogue Louis has going on, he has to now care for a girl who will be forever stuck in a five year old’s body. That is so much for someone to have to deal with mentally, it’s no wonder why Louis explains to the interviewer that it is not a romanticized life. It is not all the glory immortality seems to have a reputation to be. Despite all of the psychological torment, there is a great benefit to the way these characters are portrayed. Anne Rice did a fantastic job of not fetishizing gay romance and toxic relationships. A lot of novels have a history of making either queer relationships that are objectively bad in some kind of retrospect, or making the romance very shallow. In this novel, it is portrayed as a real relationship that has a lot more down than ups; it’s important to realize that queer people also have real relationships that can be abusive. They are people with real feelings and should not be romanticized. Louis’ personal growth is slow, and at first glance can seem like it doesn’t progress all that much, but he learns to be a brotherly figure to Claudia who is still slowly growing mentally, though her body is the same. He has to acclimate to the immortal lifestyle, find someone to care for Claudia so he can move on, and then try to kill his abuser multiple times (each time ultimately failing, but succeeding in making Lestat miserable) before having every vampire he knows be killed by his love interest. What a life to live. It’s no wonder that he reacts the way he does at the end when the interviewer asks to be turned. Louis by the end is completely bare of emotion and passion. There’s only so much someone can take emotionally, and I think there’s no better way he could’ve ended his interview.
