The Vampire Lestat was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1985, nine years after Interview with the Vampire. Where the first novel was Louis’s story — melancholy, guilt-ridden, introspective — the sequel is Lestat’s, and the tonal shift is dramatic. Lestat is flamboyant, unapologetic, and hungry for experience. He begins by objecting to Louis’s portrayal of him in Interview (which, in the novel’s fiction, has been published as a book) and proceeds to tell his own version.
Lestat’s origin story begins in pre-revolutionary France: the youngest son of a provincial aristocratic family, he escapes to Paris, becomes an actor, and is seized by the ancient vampire Magnus, who transforms him and then immediately destroys himself, leaving Lestat without a guide. Lestat’s subsequent journey takes him through the vampire underworld of 18th-century Paris (the Théâtre des Vampires, a coven of theatrical vampires who have codified their existence into ritual), across the Mediterranean to ancient Egypt, and into the deep history of vampire-kind: the origin of the first vampires, Akasha and Enkil, Egyptian royals who were possessed by a spirit that merged with their blood.
In the novel’s present, Lestat has awakened from a decades-long sleep into the 1980s and decided to become a rock star — to make the vampire visible, to break the secrecy that has governed vampire existence for millennia. Rice uses the rock-star metaphor to explore Lestat’s essential nature: he is a performer, a seducer, someone who refuses to hide what he is. The novel expands the Vampire Chronicles from a personal drama into a cosmological mythology, setting up the events of The Queen of the Damned.
Collecting The Vampire Lestat
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1985): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100
- Signed: $200–$500