Jay Kristoff's Reviews > Interview with the Vampire

Disclaimer: I was pretty young when I first met this book. If I was young today (sniff) I'd probably have been called an emo, but back then they called us goths. And truth be told, I was actually a metalhead who just liked (and thus, hung around) the goth girlies, but what the fuck does that have to do with Goodreads...

Point is, this is One Of Those Books for me. The ones that comes along at a certain point in your life and kinda change the way you see the world. I must've read it half a dozen times over the course of my life, and there's maybe a handful of books that can claim that (dubious) prize.

So, this is a book about VAMPIRES. Not the sparkly perfect boyfriend kind. Not the kind who plays baseball and goes to highschool. And I know the T-series is an easy target these days, but it's (inexplicably) the benchmark by which most readers measure vampire novels, so in this case, it's fair game.

This is a book about the kind of vampires who slowly erode over the centuries, whose humanity gently withers and dies, whose good intentions gradually give way to the monster inside. It's a story about the battle with hunger, and how on a long enough timeline, the hunger always wins.

It's a book about immortality. Scouring off the glimmering sheen that lies in the ideal of living forever, and exploring the crushing reality of a life unending. Watching everything you knew, the world in which you grew up, washed away one decade at a time. Watching all the things you knew and love wither and fade, while you remain, changeless and deathless, with only the monster inside you for company. It takes the romance of vampirism, an ideal that so many people are in love with, and strips it back to the ugly, parasitic truth. Everything - love, friendship, trust, hope, beauty, aspiration, creativity, EVERYTHING dies on a timeline of forever. Except you and the hunger inside you.

This book was written by Anne Rice as a means of coping with tragedy in her own life, and the pathos bleeds from every page. Powerful stuff, my friends. It's certainly not a happy book - don't read it for the luls. But if you feel the need to cast aside your sparklevamps and read a vampire story with a little more depth, this is an awesome place to start.