The Best Vampire Book

Interview With a Vampire
By Anne Rice

As the book starts, we see the vampire speaking in an interview. His confession includes life as a two hundred year old living dead.

He speaks quietly, gently taking us to the night when he lost his human life to a great vampire Lestat. At first he tells of sucking blood from rats caught in the streets of New Orleans. Slowly he begins to feed on the blood of humans. Finally he tells of leaving human life altogether to the tutelage of the hated Lestat. He soon embraces the hunger and feelings of vampirism.

He tells us of a night in a dark New Orleans street when he finds a lost young child Claudia. He tries to resist hurting her but fails. Soon she becomes one of them.

Claudia is made a vampire. For all of eternity she will be trapped in a body of a small child. They join forces against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a journey across Europe in search for others like themselves, desperately wanting to discover a world they can belong to.

They go from Austria to Transylvania encountering many like them. In Paris they find the Theatre des Vampires, a beautiful theatre whose participants are the non-living.