Fake News Interview With The Vampire

I loooove Ann Rice. If you’ve never read her books, you need read no farther. And I would be fascinated if any of you polymaths who DO like them would let me know.

Did you like the series of novels that began with Interview With The Vampire?
If so:
Don’t bother with the new AMC series of that name.

I didn’t mind that Louis was black, cuz Anne Rice wrote another novel about mulatto society in New Orleans, “The Feast of All saints”, great book, so I thought maybe they were just trying to work that in. And I didn’t mind a tad of polymorphous perversity between Louis and Lestat,I also thought that was fair. You get curious during immortality.

Also, this actor is the best Lestat I have ever seen. He’s perfect, as far as the casting goes.

But what I sadly have to tell you is that this version is gay porn. Pure ‘n’ simple.

I’m very disappointed.

Oh and PS—equally unforgivably: it’s woke.

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While I don’t quality as one of the polymaths, I did read several of Rice’s early books and thoroughly enjoyed them. I recall being emotionally moved and philosophically impressed by a prolonged discussion between the main characters in Memnoch the Devil. It centered - as I recall - on the tension between Spirit and Flesh; the desire of each to become the other. Thanks for reminding me that I have wanted to reread it for many years to see if it leaves me with the same impression today, after many years of reflection on that very subject.

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I loved Memnoch the Devil. You are so right, it would bear re-reading.
I think.my favorite stand-alone book of Rice’s is Servant of the Bones.

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I read this and found it fascinating. The conversation is between Lastat and the Devil. It’s the story of the fallen angel from the perspective of the devil.

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Anne Rice lost her daughter, age 5 to leukemia. Like AS Byatt’s writing, her fiction seems to me to be an attempt to make sense of that, and sometimes, like Byatt, she punishes the reader by bereaving us of a character in some terrible, abrupt way.
But she never does presume to answer the question, what HAPPENED to her daughter, where if anywhere is she now? Oh there are “spirits”, but they aren’t the same as human souls. And they don’t know what does happen to souls.
But—I never read her novel about Jesus, written during a late conversion to Catholicism. Maybe she gets into that question in that one.
She died in 2021, so — She is either reunited with her darling girl, or she knows nothing. Either way the awful pain of that loss is over. (Or IS it? After all we can lose track of people even in this finite world—if there is any consciousness after death, maybe the pain of separation goes on. And on. )

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