I read this book first when I was like 14 to impress my brother’s friend Scott. He was into Nine Inch Nails and Pantera and he played a bunch of Sega/SNES RPGs and so anyway, yeah, you read some Vampire novels if you want to be in Scott’s good graces.
So it read it then. And when I started my Goodreads twenty years later I gave this a 3/5 based on my memory of it. But I was wrong. It’s just good. It really is, and it holds up. I loved the movie when I that age, so it shouldn’t surprise me that I liked the novel still a lot as I got older.
I listened to the audiobook, so that helped a lot. And it was read by Simon Vance, and that helped a LOT.
But the book itself is a meditation of the changing of the world in the last 200 hundred years. It focuses a lot on modernity issues of buildings and technology and concepts of intimacy and eternity. So basically it’s a novel about everything. It’s also kind of about solipsism. If you are a vampire and you have lived forever, and there is no one else like you, it’s impossible to see your existence as anything but all there is.
The novel itself falls into some small cliched language at times, but Anne Rice knows what she is doing. So it works.
Also, at one point Louis mentions “Color and the Shape” of something, and it made me think of the Foo Fighters album and how much that played into who High School Vel Veeters was huh. Trips down memory lane indeed.
I never did read the follow-up novels so maybe that’s my next step.
Just read this one too, thank you for reminding me I need to see the movie. *looks up solipsism* Yeah. I agree, good point.
Thirteen-year-old me loved this book SO much. My best friend and I spent every single recess and lunch break talking about the books (we also loved The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned) and we, for real, had a detailed plan for how we would get the books out of our houses in case of fire. Because obviously, the books would have to be saved before anything else.
The movie was age limit 18 when it opened in Norway, and my friend and I were only 15 at the time. It’s the only movie I’ve lied about my age to get into – we’re very lucky the bored cinema attendant didn’t do his job properly and check our ID’s.
Because I was put off the series by the incredibly poor quality of some of the later books (I know now that endless sequels – NOT a good thing), I haven’t read these books for nearly two decades now. I should probably re-read them at some point.
I read this book in high school and it freaked me out. This review makes me sort of want to revisit with adult eyes . . .
I read this for the first time a couple of years ago and really liked it though at several points I did not to tell Louis to stop being such a whiny brat.
*did want to tell
Oops!