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Friday 27 May 2011

Interviewing vampires

Anne Rice is the one really to blame when we talk about the emasculation of vampires. It was her Louis in Interview with a Vampire that created the whole, 'oh gee I'm undead, I'm going to sulk about it for the next 200 years,' genre.
Although to be fair Interview, the first book in her vampire chronicles was actually not bad, not bad at all. It had a lot of mystery, it was very original (at the time) and it had the character of Lestat to balance out all of Louis's numbing introspection.
Unfortunately due to the huge success of that novel too many vampires since have been modeled on the Louis character and not Lestat.
Yes Lestat was unspeakably cruel and evil in the first book (don't even ask about the later books, shudder) but he went about his dastardly acts in such a pedestrian, almost frat boy like way that it was sort of endearing.
But still it's Louis, mopey Louis who's a vampire but kind of sort of wishes' he wasn't and worse yet can't shut up about it,  that has become the vampire mold. He's the undead as the undead would be on Dr.Phil, he's the undead on Prozac, he's the undead that's spawned a generation of sappy romance novels that have turned vampires into latter day James Deans instead of blood sucking, cruel, ravenous, womanizers.

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