Anne Rice on the Allure of Vampires

I will confess that I have read every one of Anne Rice's vampire novels. I love the homoerotic subplots and I identify with the need to deal with being "other" that the main characters such as Lestat grapple with. While the vampire genre had always been around, Rice was one of the first authors to take it to new levels with The Vampire Chronicles. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Rice talks about the derivation of her own books and her thoughts on the burgeoning genre in the form of True Blood and the Twilight series. It is noteworthy what she has to say about the parallels between gays and vampires in society. Here are some highlights from the interview:

So what’s your take on the Twilight series? It really does seem to go against the grain in its depiction of vampires.

I think the concept is so rich in itself. It’s like the concept of the cowboy or the detective. Vampires have become almost like a genre, like the Western. What I see happening, with writers like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, is the domestication of the vampire. I was more interested in a powerful, Old World figure that had a lot of knowledge, experience, and was surrounded by a lot of glamour and mystery. I wanted to keep the romance. I loved the idea of these people gaining wisdom as they aged, and how that might cause them to be ever more tormented by the fact that they don’t really belong in the world and they prey on human beings, who they’ve really come to appreciate. Charlaine Harris is doing something different by imagining what it’s like if vampires are legal and you have them living in your Southern town, and I think she gets a tremendous amount of energy out of that.

True Blood is set in your native Louisiana, and it really uses vampirism as a metaphor for outsiders, including the gay community. What are your thoughts on using vampirism as a metaphor for the disenfranchised?

It’s a given! The vampire is an outsider. He’s the perfect metaphor for those things. He’s someone who looks human and sounds human, but is not human, so he’s always on the margins. When I write and assume the point of view of the vampire, I understand the agony of being a public outcast—someone who doesn’t belong anywhere, yet longs to be part of something and gravitates to other outcasts of his own kind. I remember the year Interview With the Vampire was published, a young man came to me at Berkeley and told me he thought Interview With the Vampire was “the longest sustained gay allegory in the English language.” I was kind of amazed and honored that he was unpacking that from it, but it wasn’t a conscious thing.

I saw your cheeky Facebook post about how your vampires would “feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun.”

[Laughs] Oh, I was just joking. People ask me what I think about that, and I finally pretended that Lestat and Louis were real and gave their opinion on what they thought of the vampires in Twilight. Unfortunately, I think some of Stephenie Meyer readers took it the wrong way, came to my Facebook page, and were quite unpleasant. But I think they’re very … young. It was quite a ruckus!

Back to True Blood, how do you feel about the show’s depiction of vampires as these uninhibited, primal, sexual beings?

I’m a fan of the show. I see it as a logical part of it all. [Harris] has expanded the sexuality that’s inherent in that idea. I didn’t think of that, but as my books went on, I involved my vampires in more sexuality. But I couldn’t go as far as Charlaine Harris did, because I had said that my vampires can’t have sex; that the act of drinking blood is orgasmic for them. She’s doing it a different way. She’s saying that this blood drinker must also be dynamite in bed. Makes sense!