Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice invented the vampire novel we recognize today—the introspection, the grief, the immortality-as-existential-curse—and this is where it begins. Louis's narration is a confession that never quite resolves into absolution, and Lestat exists in every scene like a bruise you keep pressing. The queer subtext is not particularly sub; Rice is doing something deliberate with love, dependency, and the violence between people who cannot leave each other. Difficult and devastating and genuinely literary in a genre that rarely tries.