literary lads we love: lestat and louis (the vampire chronicles)

Previously: Lawrence Selden, of The House of Mirth

Guys, why am I so intense. I basically have storyboarded this entire film. I meant to make like a handful of graphics and write up a little concise post and instead I am insane.

I feel like I need to preface this with one thing: as much as I love these novels, I find Anne Rice herself morally repugnant. I have to get that out of the way first. She's racist, questionably sexist, and kind of a pedophile? I am usually flippant about that, but I find it incredibly problematic how she commonly either sexualizes children or infantilizes grown women in sexual situations. And when I say 'sexist,' I mean…it's more of a vibe than anything else? I have yet to read her female-heavy series (the Mayfair witches), though I plan to, and ironically I adore her female characters A LOT but sometimes it feels like they came about by accident? I don't know. I just get the feeling that she worships men a little bit, but that may just be the vampire books. Aaaaand racism. In her books it's a either exclusion of PoC or making them the ~mystical ~other. Also, weirdly, the older and more powerful her vampires become, the whiter they become; almost statuesque, made of marble, in their pristine whiteness. It bothers me immensely that their increase in power and therefore status is linked to their incredibly pale skin. I don't think she is aware that she's doing it but that doesn't make it okay at all. There's also her public support of Paula Deen, so.

Long story short, I find Anne Rice to be shady and full of issues, and yet I love these books so much. I love the characters. I love the overwrought, rhapsodic prose. I just love them. And it's always conflicting to love something when you are aware that it is problematic. I wish I could just shut off my feelings for things like that, you know? But the best you can do is keep your eyes open, own up to the fucked up parts, and not try to explain them away. I loved these books before I was aware of the extent of the problematic parts, and before I had the language to articulate what made me uncomfortable. Now I can do that, and I will do that, but I'm also going to explain why I love them too.

This post is going to focus on Lestat and Louis, primarily in the first two books of The Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. I just finished rereading Interview a few weeks ago; it was the first time I'd looked at the book since I was twelve years old. I'm going to start the second one soon, but I skimmed it for this post and I also remember it relatively well, so let's get into that creepy vampire goodness!

The first novel is told from the point of view of Louis de Pointe du Lac, a plantation owner in Louisiana in the late 1700s who is turned into a vampire by Lestat de Lioncourt, a relatively young French vampire who in his mortal life was an impoverished aristocrat from a small village. The second novel relates Lestat's life story from his point of view. Most of the following novels are also from Lestat's PoV. We do not discuss anything post-book three, so I don't even know what mess that all became; I dropped the books when Jesus got involved.

Louis is highly tormented; Lestat is a good deal more fun. I wouldn't say either character is "better" than the other, but Rice clearly gets more of a kick out of Lestat. Part of my distaste for the later books of the series stems from this – she became so infatuated with Lestat that he became somewhat of a Mary Sue, and way too much the center of attention. A lot of his very interesting mistakes and flaws from the first novel were spun to make him look better or even blameless; I could never tell if this was because he was an unreliable narrator or if it was Authorial Word of God. I suspect it started out the former and turned into the latter. Certainly all the characters begin to fawn over Lestat in the later books, whereas in the first he was more of a genuine pain in the ass, albeit a charming one. And though he is still present, Louis is very sidelined in the later books, and that always bothered me too.

The tonal shift from book one to book two is due in part to the big gap of time in between writing them. I believe they were written about a decade apart. It shows; Interview stands apart as a very different novel and, in a way, a more complete one. It feels more like literature to me, whereas over time the series began to read like fan fiction of itself. Annie fell a little too in love with her own creations and it took away a lot of what fascinated me in the beginning.

Another thing that differs from Interview to the others is that Anne Rice is fucking terrible at emotional consistency. Because of her elaborate prose style and her hyper-romantic characters and everyone's constant overwhelming beauty, the characters tend to just be madly in love with whoever they're having a scene with at any given moment. Louis was more discerning in Interview; he didn't forget the grievances he had with Lestat (which were very real) just because he also thought Lestat was hot. Even when he wanted to move on from one lover to another, it felt less frivolous than it does later, in other books. I mean, the multi-partner, everyone's bisexual quality to her novels is something I greatly enjoy, and something that seems to happen specifically because the vampires don't have sex (it makes their friendships highly romantic and oddly sexual-without-being-actually-sexual). But it also gets genuinely ridiculous. It would be nice if there was something a little more stable, you know? I am of the opinion that Lestat's most important lover is Louis, but I can never tell if I'm just seeing what I want to see.

Okay, but now let's really delve into these books! I HAVE SO MANY VAMPIRE CHRONICLES FEELINGS AND NOWHERE TO PUT THEM.

Louis' story begins with the death of his younger brother Paul. Paul is a religious fanatic who claims to have visions, which Louis flatly refuses to believe; they argue over that and, directly afterwards, Paul falls down the stairs to his death. Louis is consumed with guilt, which isn't helped by the fact that everyone (his own family included) seems to hold him responsible for Paul's death. Indeed, Louis believes that he killed Paul, and the grief and shame send him into a downward spiral. He actively courts death by engaging in dangerous behaviors, but he doesn't take the steps to take his own life. My use of the word 'actively' is kind of facetious; Louis is defined, in many ways, by his complete passivity. He simply does not take action, often because he is too wrapped up in his own torment. But, indeed, when Louis does step up, brotha does it with flames.

Ugh, I love the way the movie is shot so much – particularly Louis and Lestat seeing each other through the curtains of Louis' bed, catching hazy glimpses.

Eventually Louis' courting of danger comes to some kind of fruition, and he is attacked by Lestat. Lestat drains him and then leaves him – ill, feverish, on his death bed. (In his own novel, Lestat tries to justify his turning of Louis and, later, Claudia by saying they would have died otherwise; but, like, dude, the reason they would have died is because YOU DRANK THEIR BLOOD.) Louis is seduced by Lestat's beauty and otherworldliness, but he's convinced that Lestat only wants him for his money his plantation house, because at this point Lestat is carting around his ill, human father and needs a place to live. Which I fucking love. I love the ways in which their humanity hasn't let them go yet, these baby vampires. Anyway, later on, Lestat again disputes the money thing by claiming he fell "fatally in love" with Louis almost immediately, and that Louis believing otherwise has to do with his own humility. I do like that the different narrators give us conflicting accounts, and it says so much about each of them. Of course Louis doesn't believe that Lestat was simply taken with his beauty. That's just who Louis is.

The main crux of Louis' eternal dilemma, and his driving conflict over the course of the novel, is that he cannot reconcile his human heart with his vampire nature. He is remarked upon as deeply in touch with his mortal side in a way most vampires are not. He has no special abilities, though most vampires do; he is hardly conscious of his powers, and doesn't even try to use them. He is consumed by this catch-22 of a moral quandary, which was something else that I loved that was lost in later books: he has the greatest respect for humans, and yet he must kill to survive. Louis believes the only sin in this world is to take a human life but he has a compulsion and passion for killing that cannot be quashed thanks to what he is.

This is in direct contrast to Lestat, who plays with his victims, often befriending them before eventually moving in for the kill. Another annoying thing in later books – Annie tries to make it better, somehow, by saying Lestat kills only "evildoers," like playing God in that way is better, when the WHOLE POINT is that they are morally ambiguous protagonists who must kill if they want to live, whether they like it or not. And Lestat did like it, there is no denying that he took joy in killing. And because it is fiction, we are still able to enjoy him as a character and understand him even as we condemn his actions.

But this is one of the major conflicts Louis and Lestat's relationship. Lestat is playful, irritating, one of those fictional vampires that really relishes being a vampire, revels in the pomp and theatre and power of it. But that's who Lestat is – in his mortal life he was an actor, and he's always been a showboat. Louis is destroyed by his own dual nature, which he cannot reconcile, because it is irreconcilable. He is self-destructive in the extreme, but he cannot bring himself to commit suicide, and has great trouble destroying others, something he must do. He is attracted to Lestat and recoils from him. He wants and he fears. He's a beautiful, angst-ridden little mess who spends most of this novel wandering around having philosophical thoughts in the rain before he kills and then weeps about it. (Also, like. Louis is this tortured over death, but not concerned about the fact that he runs a plantation and has slaves??? Like????????????)

A picture is worth a thousand words, and I think these graphics describe Lestat and Louis' relationship better than I ever could. It's all bitch face all the time. Look at that hand! Look at Lestat cackle while Louis has an existential crisis!

Look at them!!!! Ugh, bless.

But, yes. So like I said, Louis is passive until he fucking burns a motherfucker down. There are several important fires in the novels, and they almost all mark the end of one "era," so to speak, and the death of a former life in favor of a new one. The first is when Louis burns down his plantation, Pointe du Lac, which is the symbolic final death of his mortal life and family. It is also important for Lestat, because he forces Louis to kill his father then (they're fleeing from being found out, among other things). The next is the burning of the home Louis shared with Lestat and Claudia. The final is the burning of the theatre where Claudia is killed.

So, after this crazy episode of burning the plantation, the two head to New Orleans. Two important events happen here, and they usher in the new era of Lestat and Louis' lives, where their intense attraction and animosity settles into an awesome, creepy, incestuous family life.

The first important event is that Louis, wandering the night Angel-style, mad and starving (since at this point he only kills animals), drains the blood of a little girl. As is his way, Lestat happens upon upon them, mocks Louis mercilessly, and gets a real kick out of it. But Louis is more horrified than ever, and runs.

The second event is that Lestat engages in some fucking master-level manipulation. He kills two prostitutes in front of Louis, to spite him and goad him, tormenting one of the women before killing her. In the film version, it is really an incredible scene. It does what it was meant to do, shocking Louis into acceptance of who and what he is, even if that acceptance is reluctant as hell.

And then after that, enter Claudia.

Lestat finds Louis and leads him, like a complacent child, to a hospital where they claim the suffering girl Louis had fed upon and bring her back to their hotel. Here Louis feeds from her again and then Lestat gives her his blood, and together they transform Claudia into a vampire. She is five years old at the time.

Lestat does it in part because he is desperate to keep Louis with him – like many people in marriages that are not working out, they try to have a baby to fix their problems. Except they have a horrifying murder baby. WHO IS ALSO THE MOST AWESOME. One day I will do a post solely about Claudia, because she is one of my favorite characters in all of literature, and that post will be glorious.

(Side note: Annie describes Claudia as "sensual" a lot. CLAUDIA HAS THE BODY OF A FIVE YEAR OLD CHILD. ANNE, WHY ARE YOU A PEDO.)

Louis is again paralyzed by his passivity. He knows it's deeply wrong but he doesn't intervene when Lestat gives Claudia his blood, insistent that there is nothing he could do to stop him. Maybe that's true. Lestat is buttloads of fun, but also kind of abusive and most certainly the most manipulative, and he knew how to get Louis to do what he wanted.

That quote is interesting to me, and also unexplored: Lestat's fear of opening up. In fact, later, I feel Lestat is very open. It's more interesting for him to be less forthcoming, I think, considering that Louis is all talk and no action – obviously Lestat must be all action and very little talk.

This is where the novel really kicks into gear. Claudia, having been turned so young, is more a vampire than either of her fathers could ever hope to be. She literally has no sense of human life at all and cannot imagine it, since she's never experienced it. One of my favorite lines in the book, which she says, is, "I have no human nature. And no short story of a mother's corpse and hotel rooms where children learn monstrosity can give me one." Part of what I love about lady vampires is that they are often unrepentantly cold and cruel in a way women are not often allowed to be while remaining "sympathetic," or at the very least interesting, in the mind of the viewer. It's delicious.

They both come alive for Claudia, and stay together happily for nearly seventy years. Louis teaches her, treats her like a human daughter in many ways, though as time passes the role of father and husband becomes somewhat conflated (incestuous nonsexual pedo vamps!). Claudia and Louis' relationship is the defining relationship of his entire life. She is his everything, absolutely. Lestat is close to her too, spoiling her and killing with her, teaching her and amusing her. Not to get too gender binary on y'all, but I think within the novel, Louis is meant to fulfill a sort of 'maternal' caretaking role and Lestat a 'paternal' disciplinary role; it's positively Freudian, because Claudia kills her father Lestat and has a confusing romantic relationship with her father/mother, Louis. There are also fun bits like this: "'What's the matter with her!' [Lestat] flared at me, as though I'd given birth to her and must know." PARENTS.

At this point it becomes very much a familial domestic drama. Louis and Lestat have a baby; the baby grows up and is filled with anger at her parents; the golden bubble of domesticity is burst. Claudia kills a mother and daughter (she is obsessed with mothers and daughters, and also with poverty, reflecting her human life) and hides the bodies in the house, which causes a huge row. She demands to know her origins, to understand; she loves Louis despite her anger so Lestat becomes the target of all her rage. The power struggle between Claudia and Lestat is one of my very favorite things, because they are both so similar and so similarly ferocious.

But she kills him. Because she is a fucking badass.

Louis loses his shit after Lestat's death, and it's one of the overwrought passages that really works for me. Annie's prose is verbose and overly descriptive, but I don't mind it, even though it can get very draggy. I think sometimes you just have to be in the mood for that kind of thing, and sometimes I am. He has this hallucination in a church and I just love it? It's very evocative. And it's one of the few instances you see his feeling for Lestat underneath his outward anger.

Lestat is not actually dead, obviously. He returns, they fight, there's another fire, and the Louis and Claudia flee to Europe, where they seek other vampires and eventually find them in Paris. And Paris is where it all falls apart for good.

Claudia has a deep, perpetual, completely justified rage at being trapped in a child's body while she has the mind of an incredibly intelligent, sophisticated woman. It comes to a head in Paris for many reasons, among them that Louis meets the vampire Armand (who I fucking hate) and wants to run off to be with him. The fissures between Claudia and Louis grow. She is in danger of destruction at the hands of the other vampires, because of her youth and violence against Lestat, her maker. She tries to warn Louis of this, but he's blinded by his love/lust for Armand and his security in the knowledge that Armand would be the ~teacher Lestat never was~ and which Louis always longed for.

Anne Rice vampires don't have sex because killing takes the place of it as the pinnacle of physical feeling and interaction, but they are sexual nonetheless, perhaps more so because they can't express it with fucking so it oozes into everything else. Which is why they are creepy and incestuous as fuck. And it also leads to couching Armand and Louis' relationship in a lot of weird philosophical nonsense terms when all they really want is to vampire-mind-fuck each other.

As Louis considers vampirism the ultimate damnation, he makes a promise to himself never to subject another to it – especially because of the guilt he feels for what he did to Claudia. But Claudia demands someone (a mother) to care for her when Louis leaves her for Armand and he reluctantly consents – or so he thinks. It destroys him, the act, and he feels it kills his last shred of humanity (it doesn't though).

This is important in relation to Armand, and it's one of the things that makes me hate him so much. Armand is responsible for Claudia's death, because he wants Louis to himself, but he is also responsible for making Louis do the one thing he swore he'd never do. Armand has telepathic abilities and he uses them to force Louis to turn Madeleine into a vampire, and Louis was unaware of this until Armand told him, all, "Oh, I thought you knew I mind controlled you? Whoops, no big." IT'S SO FUCKED UP, IN A BOOK OF VERY FUCKED UP THINGS.

Ultimately that's all pointless, too, because Armand orchestrates the the situation further to suit his needs. He is in control of the other vampires for the most part and he uses some careful manipulation to get them to kill Claudia and Madeleine. He is somewhat unintentionally helped in this by Lestat, who shows up in Paris scarred and very weak. Armand takes advantage of this by having Lestat publicly accuse Claudia of trying to kill him, which is a crime in vampireland and leads directly to her death. Lestat just wants Louis back, and though he is motivated in part by revenge, it's an empty revenge; he regrets his part in Claudia's demise, sobbing and clutching her little dress after she is burned by the sun.

Louis never recovers from Claudia's death. He is shattered by it. The humanity and connection to mortal life that Armand craved to gain from Louis is extinguished, so even though they spend many years together, Louis is disconnected totally from Armand. In many ways that is the end of Louis' story, though he continues to live and eventually reconciles with Lestat. But Claudia's death is his death, and he is never the same.

That's a quote by dickface Armand, but it's something I really love. Vampires are often seen in fiction as infinitely adaptable and it's ignored how very hard that can be, to constantly keep up with the world around you. It's an idea that's integral to Lestat, who was very modern for his time but ended up disappearing into hiding for more than fifty years because he couldn't handle the changing world. Combined with that was his near-total physical destruction, which was another thing that always struck me as fascinating. The very first thing Lestat does in his own novel is describe his appearance – he is vain in the extreme, because he's very beautiful and extroverted, very alive in his skin, but slowly that's taken from him. He becomes broken down and frail, and so he hides from the world for many years. Physical decay is something else we rarely see in fictional vampires, because their entire purpose is their eternal youth and beauty.

In his human life, Lestat was hunter and then an actor, which just about sums him up. Like I said, he's vain and a showboat and madly charismatic; he really is a fun point of view character. He is the youngest of seven brothers and feels at odds with his family, except with his mother, Gabrielle. Who is another fucking awesome lady character, by the way. She is totally constrained by her life and hates it; she and Lestat bond over their joint dreams of murdering everyone else in the family. In some ways she is like Claudia, in that she is cold and distant but also totally amazing.

Lestat is a rampant bisexual even in life, and at one point runs away to Paris to be an actor with his violin-playing boyfriend Nicolas, who is in many ways Louis' precursor. Nicolas and Louis are both self-destructive and cynical, but Louis has some underlying passion that keeps him going, which Nicki lacks. Lestat claims to love no other like he loves Louis, but does admit that some of his relationship with Louis was born of a desire to "fix" what had gone wrong with Nicki – which fails utterly, because Lestat fucks it up hardcore both times. There is a repeated refrain over the novels that vampires grow to hate their makers, because in the very act of creating them, their maker "betrays" them. While their powers are a ~dark gift~ they are also damned, and they often can't handle that very same conflict that defined Louis as a character. And, indeed, about half of Lestat's progeny goes the up-in-flames route.

In Paris, Lestat is kidnapped by an older vampire and turned – and immediately afterwards the vampire kills himself, leaving Lestat utterly alone but also in sole possession of the man's fortune. After this he seeks to take care of his remaining mortal connections, namely his mother Gabrielle and Nicki, both of whom he eventually turns into vampires. Nicki, as Louis' dark mirror, hates Lestat for doing so and goes mad, essentially. Nicki kills himself by immolation. Gabrielle, on the other hand, is granted the freedom she had always wanted. She's amazing. She cuts off her hair and dresses like a man and disappears for long stretches into the wilderness, living the life of an adventurer, which she could never do as a mortal. She and Lestat also have a weird incestuous thing too, IDK, Anne Rice what is up with that. But ignoring incest for a moment, look at this passage wherein I adore Gabrielle:

AND THE GODDESS THIRSTS. FOR THE BLOOD OF WEAKER MEN, I'M SURE.

I'm burning through The Vampire Lestat here because this post is already gigantic, and I'm just trying to hit the highlights of Lestat's emotional journey. There is a lot that happens between his abandonment by his mother/Nicki's death and the start of Interview, but I'm going to zip right over to the end. Lestat eventually emerges from hiding in the 1980s, because he hears rock music (no joke) and joins a band and BECOMES A VAMPIRE ROCK STAR. It's awesome, but do you see what I mean about these books becoming fanfic of themselves? Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it is a TONAL SHIFT in the extreme. In addition to being a rock star, Lestat reveals his true nature to the world; the first two novels of the series also exist within the novels themselves, the first published by the interviewer Louis told his story to and the second by Lestat himself. It's the in-world publication of these two novels that finally allows for Lestat and Louis to reconcile, with a tenderness they had never been able to express before. Louis gets sidelined not long after, but I was always hugely into their relationship, so I enjoyed all the shippy nonsense of them getting back together.

I mean, ugh. I'm only human, okay. I like when pretty dudes put their faces together.

Like Louis, I am also eternally bitter. However my bitterness stems from the fact that they did not immediately make a movie of The Vampire Lestat in 1995 with Tom Cruise like they planned to, because the first movie is so perfect. So I made a little mockup to try and give a visual ~sense of the novel, especially as I spent way less time discussing it. I updated the casting because if any current actor needs to play Lestst, it is Harry Lloyd. It actually pains me that he is not playing Lestat somewhere as we speak, right now. He was BORN to play Lestat. And Franois Arnaud as Louis, because.

I feel as though I am ending this post on an abrupt note, but if you managed to actually make it all the way through, then I salute you and hope you'll forgive me for a less than poetic end.

Talk to me about all kinds of vampires in fiction in the comments!! It is one of my favorite topics ever and so little expressed on my lj!