50th Anniversary of Interview With The Vampire
50 years on, Anne Rice's internationally-known book Interview With The Vampire still grips readers with its dark, romantic, and scintillating story of Louis de Pointe du Lac explaining his painful and pleasurable journey leaving humanity and becoming a creature of the night.
Anne is, sadly, no longer with us, so her son Chris Rice and his podcast co-host Eric Shaw Quinn, both authors in their own right, will take time on Halloween day to delve deep into Interview With The Vampire's lasting legacy, how it came to be, and what it means to fans old and new. Where Y'at Magazine spoke with Rice and Quinn ahead of their Saturday event about the rocky road the book had in the beginning and how it's tale eventually found a huge audience.
WYAT: Why is Interview With The Vampire still so popular after 50 years?
Interview With The Vampire continues to be a novel in which countless outsiders discover their own voice. For the first time in history, it told the vampire's story from the vampire's point of view, a vampire who struggles with his dark gift and his dark fate. That was how Anne turned vampires into a metaphor for all of us who struggle with our earthly predicament. It endures because it's more than a vampire story, more than a compelling piece of Gothic horror. It's a story about faith and morality. Everyone who reads it walks away from the experience asking themselves the same question—how do we define a monster when all of us consume life in some form? Like all of the great Anne Rice novels that followed it uses supernatural elements to tell a passionate, serious story about what it means to be alive.
WYAT: Do you think that younger generations of people react to the story differently than those who were adults when it released?
Leigh Bardugo, the amazing #1 New York Times bestselling author who wrote the foreword to the new edition and who will be appearing on stage with us this Saturday at 3 p.m. in Roussel on the Loyola University campus, has a wonderful quote about people who love Interview. Everyone who reads it feels like they're the first one to discover it. We think that comes from the incredibly intimate tone of the novel, of the way it's told. A sensual confession given by an extraordinary supernatural being who has witnessed centuries of history. Regardless of their age or when they discovered the novel, the fandom feels an intense devotion to these characters and to the author who created them. Both of us are determined to keep Anne's legacy alive, and along with these loyal fans our greatest partner in this is the city of New Orleans, which still showers us with such warmth and such affection for everything Anne did for the city.
WYAT: Chris, you are nearly the same age as the book. Do you feel that you grew up along with it?
Christopher here. I was born into a world where Interview With The Vampire was a flop of a novel that haunted my mother's career while she tried to write more supposedly literary historical works like The Feast Of All Saints and Cry To Heaven. In the afterword to the new edition, I talk about the first time as a young child I saw readers come to one of my mother's book signings dressed as vampires. It was an early sign that this critical and commercial disappointment was slowly gaining an audience of readers, an audience that would eventually become big enough to convince my mother to write a follow up in 1984 that paved the way for a juggernaut of a series, The Vampire Chronicles. What I grew up with was the powerful renaissance this book underwent. It taught me that the initial response to an artist's work doesn't always determine its fate. Once you put something creative out into the world, it can always be discovered later.
WYAT: Y'all started off writing fiction, but have had success lately with the true crime podcast. True crime has certainly exploded in popularity in the past decade. Why do you think people want to hear these true and grim stories?
The two of us both love mysteries and we've both published multiple mystery novels ourselves, so true crime felt like a natural extension. But true crime junkies like us aren't addicted to the grim nature of the stories—we're obsessed with solving them, with getting closure for the grieving. It's the tales of crusading detectives and investigators that compel us most. And even in the unsolved stories there's always the hope that the pieces might come together. We were honored to play our own role in the solving of a recent cold case in Los Angeles, the murder of a young gay man in 1990 named Billy Newton. The results of our work are featured in a forthcoming Discovery ID/ HBO Max documentary called My Brother's Killer, which premieres on December 3rd.
WYAT: What should people expect from this event on Saturday?
They should expect the two of us to hang out and chat with each and every one of them after the event. Anne would stay and sign for people until all hours and the two of us are very proud to carry on her tradition. So bring your camera phones and your best Anne Rice stories! We've been speeding all over New Orleans this week promoting the event and the new edition, and we haven't had much chance to just stop and be with the fans. Please come visit it. We're really looking forward to it. The entire stage event will be recorded for an episode of our podcast Dinner Partners, and during it, we will be pretty much fanboying out over our incredible guest, the author of the new edition's foreword, Leigh Bardugo, who also writes incredible dark fantasy and horror novels that we know Anne would have loved.
Interview With The Vampire: 50th Anniversary Event will take place on Saturday, October 31 at 3 p.m. at Loyola's Roussel Performance Hall. Tickets are available at this link, and each ticket includes a copy of the book's 50th Anniversary edition pre-signed by Rice and Quinn.
