Anne Rice's Mayfair Chronicles: 3-Book Boxed Set: The Mayfair Witches, Lasher, and Taltos (Lives of Mayfair Witches)
Anne Rice
4.5
Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles, Book 1
by Anne RiceCategory
About this book
The time is now. We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks—as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. . . He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night when he departed human existence as heir—young, romantic, cultivated—to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted by the radiant and sinister Lestat into the other, the "endless," life . . . learning first to sustain himself on the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of human beings . . . to the years when, moving away from his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the habits, hungers, feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures. He carries us back to the crucial moment in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her, struggling against the last residue of human feeling within him . . . We see how Claudia in turn is made a vampire—all her passion and intelligence trapped forever in the body of a small child—and how they arrive at their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night curving into night with their vampire senses heightened to the beauty of the world, thirsting for the beauty of death—a constant stream of vulnerable strangers awaiting them below . . . We see them joined against the envious, dangerous Lestat, embarking on a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, desperate to discover the world they belong to, the ways of survival, to know what they are and why, where they came from, what their future can be . . . We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps behind them, in exact rhythm with their own, steer them to the doors of the Théâtre des Vampires—the beautiful, lewd, and febrile mime theatre whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . to their meeting with the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a whole brilliant and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they have feared and fled . . . In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview with the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order.
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What readers are saying
Ken RenGift it to yourself!
"It’s all fine. Delivered on time. Efficiently wrapped. Simón Vance voice is mesmerizing to my ears, not my first experience with his works. If I had to vote, he is the best. Regarding the story itself, well, I take it as a work of fiction, indeed a fascinating one. So I plunged into it with the innocent mind of a naive learner. I bought it to increase my English vocabulary and in that regard, it perfectly helped accomplishing my goal. Many of those sentences are amazing. I don’t believe I would use them in business conversations though, because that’s not their purpose, and that’s exactly the point of learning: To be exposed to different styles and to explore different angles of relating a story, and in doing so, placing ourselves above it, refining both our language skills and our understanding of the author cultural point of view. If you are, like myself, already fluent and proficient in this wonderful language, and, very important, are doing it for personal pleasure, do yourself a favor and plunge into it. Good luck! ["
December 17, 2025 Verified Purchase
Lady MBAlways Wonderful
"I read this book when she first wrote it. I bought a paperback copy on a rack in gas station while on a trip! That copy had three sickly pale individuals who were our main characters looking like Vampires. I gobbled the book up and told my then husband that this was the greatest horror book ever written. I went on to read the rest. I also read the Witching Hour series. My daughter read those also and now I have an adult granddaughter named Rowan because my daughter fell in love with that name. She is now 49! Anne Rice is brilliant and vampires are still my favorite topic of reading. ["
March 26, 2026 Verified Purchase
