To celebrate Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which turns 50 this year, her son Christopher Rice is honoring the gothic horror novel’s legacy.
“So many generations of readers who felt like outsiders, who felt like they didn’t belong, connected with Louis’s point of view on such a deep and visceral level that it created this incredibly intimate moment,” Rice told People. “So many of the people who come up to talk to us about this book had a joyful response to it. They had a response that was about feeling liberated, feeling seen, feeling acknowledged for the first time.”
It reminded Rice of Dinner with Anne co-host Eric Shaw Quinn’s connection to Interview with the Vampire.
“He said it was like Anne reached out to him and said, ‘you are perfect exactly the way you are,’” Rice said. “This book in 1976 was part of this social movement wave of people stepping forward and deciding, my story deserves to be told, too.”
But late-70s social shifts weren’t her only inspiration. Rice revealed the loss of his sister led his mother to write Interview with the Vampire.
“This is essentially a book born of a mother’s grief,” he told People. “My mother lost my sister. She was deep in alcoholism. She was trying to sort through the sense that she had now completely lost her religion that she had grown up with. She’d abandoned parts of it before, but now she’d really lost her faith in God.”
As the novel’s legacy endures, fans still wonder whether Rice’s father inspired Lestat de Lioncourt. Rice said the character resembles his mother.
“Anne was Lestat,” he told People. “The Anne who came out of her grief and her depression, in which she wrote Interview with the Vampire, who found her voice, who moved on, who stopped starting every day by opening a can of beer, that was Lestat.”
The 50th anniversary edition of Interview with the Vampire, on sale now, includes an embossed jacket, sprayed edges, designed endpapers, a new foreword and afterword from Leigh Bardugo and Christopher Rice respectively and bonus pages from the original manuscript.