Interview with the Vampire

Louis tells his story to a reporter in a San Francisco room, but the story itself belongs to New Orleans — its plantation houses, its French Quarter shadows, its particular talent for making death feel sensual. Rice invented the modern literary vampire here: not a monster but a philosopher, cursed with immortality and the moral burden of killing to survive. The 18th-century New Orleans sections glow with candlelight and menace. Lestat is magnificent and terrible. The child vampire Claudia is the book's broken heart. Rice understood that New Orleans was already Gothic before she added the fangs — a city where the dead are buried above ground because the water table won't keep them down.