Interview with a Vampire

So, in contrast to my post of why I loved Let the Right One In, I will now write why I kind of like Interview with a Vampire by the Queen of vampires herself. I think I give more credit this book just because Anne Rice was the first to bring about the "vampire as a sex toy" phase instead of just another romance writer branching off of the same cliche. It's not a cliche if you were the first one to do it therefore you already have won more merit for writing such a thing. That being said, I'm not a huge fan of this particular use of vampires purely due to what this genre has come to (e.i. Twilight). I would like to think that my intellect requires more than just a hormone driven porn plot for a 600 page novel. I rather like books such as Sherwood Smith's Sunshine that has more to do with the lore of vampires and the culture of a modern world that happens to have multitudes of monsters in it. This is also the reason that I expressed during my post about the vampire movie we watched.

However, I admit that Ms. Rice saves herself here where most secondary writers fail. She does actually go in depth about the world and culture of these vampires. The unwritten "rules" of what is morally wrong and right for vampires and their internal debate about whether the mortality of others is really their problem. Are they entirely new creatures that don't abide by the same homo-sapien laws at all even though they were once humans themselves or are they technically humans with super-human powers attained through a virus? What are the limitations of vampires? Are they obsessed with mortality? All this leads to question like is there a god? Where did the vampire disease originate? All of this is embodied in to two characters that both get along and don't due to these very questions which have the audience thinking about them as if they too were in the same state. If you were a vampire that had these powers would you be happy or would you be lonely?

This is why this novel is worth reading even though sexual themes do pop up for those who are into those kind of things.