http://www.nextmagazine.com/content/lestat-rises
When Anne Rice walked away from her Vampire Chronicles after the publication of 2003’s tepidly received Blood Canticle, she wasn’t sure she would ever return to the world of her most famous characters. “I felt I was empty. I didn’t think there was anymore,” she says. “I had lost a sense of fun and mayhem and chaos with the series.”
But after 11 years, Rice has returned to the series and its irrepressibly seductive hero in her latest novel, Prince Lestat (October 28, Knopf). Or, perhaps more accurately, the vampires have returned to her. In Blood Canticle, Rice says, “I left it open ended—they’re all out there living their lives and journeying through eternity. But they stopped talking to me. Now they’re talking to me. They won’t shut up!”
With the exception of Bram Stoker, no writer has been as influential as Rice has on vampire literature. Everything from HBO’s True Blood to The Twilight Saga to Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive owes at least some debt to her tales of brooding, existential blood drinkers. Lestat, Louis, and the rest of the immortals who populate The Vampire Chronicles have made Rice one of contemporary fiction’s most successful authors. They’ve inspired film and comic-book adaptations, and earned her legions of devoted fans. But Rice says she didn’t set out to single-handedly reinvent the vampire genre with 1976’s Interview with the Vampire. “I didn’t really think of it in those terms because I didn’t know there was a vampire genre,” she admits. “I wanted to do something different. I wanted to do something original and something new.”
With Prince Lestat, Rice is pushing the envelope even further. She’s said that in many ways the novel is a sequel to the most sweeping of the Vampire Chronicles, 1988’s The Queen of the Damned. As the new novel opens, the vampires of the world are in crisis, prompting them to look to the long-absent Lestat for guidance. “I wanted it to be epic in scope,” says Rice. “I didn’t really want to come back and write just a book of Lestat’s lonely roamings and observations. I wanted to deal with the whole tribe.”
Rice insists that the vampires are still with her; she’s already hard at work on the follow-up to Prince Lestat. And at 73, she still has plenty to say about the eternally young. “I don’t see the world the way I did when I was 35, but I feel amazingly like the same person,” she says. “I’m always seeking knowledge, always seeking new insights, always seeking to understand the larger scheme of things. Whatever I’m writing about—whether it’s eternally young vampires or 5,000-year-old immortals—it’s going to be about that to some extent: about that eternal quest for understanding. The vampires are the perfect vehicle for me personally to talk about the world.”