"Did Daniel know that Interview with the vampire was in the bookstores?

'I must confess I enjoy this small measure of notoriety,' Armand had said with exquisite politeness and a vicious smile. 'What puzzles me is that you do not want notoriety! You did not list yourself as the 'author,' which means you are either very modest or a coward. Either explanation would be very dull.' "

~

" 'Not fiction?' Jesse asked. 'I don't understand.'

'The author's name is a pseudonym,' David continued, 'and the royalty cheques go to a nomadic young man who resists all our attempts at contact. He was a reporter, however, much like the boy interviewer in the novel. But's thats neither here nor there at the moment. Your job is to go to New Orleans and document the events in the story which took place there before the Civil War.'

'Wait a minute. You're telling me there are vampires? That these characters - Louis and Lestat and the little girl Claudia - are real!'

'Yes, exactly,' David answered. 'And don't forget about Armand, the mentor of the Théatre des Vampries in Paris. You do remember Armand.' "

The Queen of the Damned ~ Anne Rice

The first, Interview with the Vampire, is a confession by Louis, a vampire, to a boy reporter, who publishes the story under the pseudonym Anne Rice. In it, Louis explains that he became a vampire under the inept direction of a vampire named Lestat, and details what it was like to carry the subsequent burden of guilt and remorse for two centuries.

Using the same pseudonym, the vampire Lestat writes the rest of the Chronicles. He describes his own experience of being a vampire and how he used it to become a rock star. As a result, he shakes up the vampire world by calling forth the vampire progenitor Akasha. She enlists him in her plan to change the mortal world as well, and is eventually dispatched, to the great risk of the vampire race. The Fourth Chronicle is an adventure in which Lestat agrees to switch bodies with a mortal con artist. His next book takes him to Heaven and Hell with the Devil. He meets God, hears the story of creation, and returns to Earth more afraid for his soul than before. (Lestat actually dictates this book to David Talbot.) All of the novels involve themes of good and evil, free wil, immortality, and redemption.

As a corpus, the Chronicles involve a cosmology of the spiritual and supernatural world that shows it to be on a continuum with the natural world, although it still retains and eternal mystery.

Although Rice created her own vampire mythos, she changed and evolved some of its facets through the four books. For example, when Louis describes his transformation, he mentions hearing a drum, which turns out to be his heart beating with Lestat's. Lestat, however, adds to this experience by describing visions of Magnus, his vampire maker, and then Daniel sees Lestat and Louis acknowledge him as he makes the change. Others even hear voices during their transformation. Thus, the more involved Rice became with her characters, the more nuances she added to the most sensual and dramatic aspects of their experience.

Also, in the first novel, Rice had viewed the vampires as a bit more sinister. Injected into various parts of Louis's confession are allusions comparing vampires to insects; these were inspired by a science fiction story from the fifties about a man who was really a giant insect.

"That has always been part of my image of the vampire," Rice says, "that tall, dark man in that story who was camouflaged. I'm fascinated by the whole idea of the thing that looks human but really isn't. Transvestites and drag queens and all forms of illusion - it's all linked together for me."

As part of the theme, lestat seems more callous and vile in IV than he turns out to be in subsequent novels. While the apparent discrepancies may be confusing, they are easily attributable to the divergences of a story told from two perspectives. Louis had a dependent, passive personality and he rages against the one who will not take him by the hand through the most unique experience he has ever had. Lestat, however, is a tough, independent character who knows better than to do such a thing. Although he knows that he is evil, his motives and actions are not as despicable as how Louis, within his embittered perspective, presents them to be.

An evolution of ideas, characters, and cosmologies is inevitable in a series of novels that spans so many years and so much mythological material, and stories that Rice has not yet told may hold keys to even deeper mysteries of the vampire nature.

"For me" she explains, "the philosophical meaning of being a vampire has been fully explored. It's time for a mutation. I feel that all my novels mutate toward the end into something else. They end with the butterfly stretching its wings. The Vampire Chronicles have mutated."

Time Line

Around 4000 B.C. (before the fall of Jericho)
Akasha brings the twins to her court; Khayman rapes them, and Mekare then asks the spirit Amel to avenge them.
Amel fuses with Akasha and makes her a vampire; she in turn makes Enkil a vampire.
Maharet has a mortal daughter, Miriam, who starts the Great Family; Khayman takes Maharet and Mekare back to Egypt.
Akasha makes Khayman a vampire.
Khayman makes Mekare, who makes Maharet.
Maharet and Mekare are separated and sealed into coffins; both escape but fail to find each other.
Akasha and Enkil make other vampires; they are worshiped, then trapped for many years so other vampires can steal their blood. Finally, they free themselves, but gradually begin to withdraw from the world.
Khayman makes vampires who war with vampires Akasha and Enkil made.

Around 3000 B.C.
Akasha and Enkil go into their trance.

Around 1000 B.C
Maharet makes Eric a vampire.

Roman Empire (after 49 B.C.)
The Elder places Akasha and Enkil in the sun, causing vampires everywhere to be burned or destroyed.
The God of the Grove (the Druid's vampire) makes forty-year-old Marius a vampire.
Mael becomes a vampire.
Marius takes Akasha and Enkil out of Egypt to Antioch.
Maharet goes to Antioch and puts a dagger in Akasha's heart to establish the truth of the legend that Akasha must exist for all other vampires to exist.

1300s
Santino becomes a vampire.

1400s
Marius makes Armand a vampire when Armand is seventeen years old.
Magnus becomes a vampire.

1760
Lestat's mortal birth.

1766
Louis's mortal birth.

1779
Lestat goes with Nicolas to Paris, to become an actor.

1780 (winter)
Mangnus makes twenty-year-old Lestat a vampire, then goes into the fire.
Lestat makes Gabrielle a vampire.
Lestat encounters Armand's coven.
Lestat makes Nicolas a vampire.
Lestat gives Renaud's theatre to four vampires who, with Nicolas, turn it into the Theatre of the Vampires.

1780 (May)
Lestat and Gabrielle begin their journey on the Devil's Road; Lestat writes his first of many messages to Marius.

1789
Nicolas goes into the fire.
Lestat's mortal family is killed during the French Revolution.
Gabrielle leaves Lestat to go into the jungles.
Lestat goes underground.
Marius comes to Lestat and takes him to the island where Akasha and Enkil sit as statues. Lestat awakens Akasha, but Marius then sends Lestat away.
Lestat arrives in New Orleans.
Claudia's mortal birth.

1791
Lestat makes twenty-five-year-old Louis a vampire.

1794
Slaves drive Lestat and Louis from Pointe du Lac.
Lestat makes five-year-old Claudia a vampire.

1795
The three then settle into the town house in New Orleans.

1862
Claudia attacks Lestat and throws his remains into the swamp; when Lestat survives and returns, Louis burns the town house and he and Claudia flee.
Claudia and Louis travel by ship to Eastern Europe, to seek out Old World Vampires.
Claudia and Louis go to Paris.
Louis meets Armand and his coven at the Theatre of the Vampires.
Louis makes Madeleine a vampire.
Armand's coven destroys Claudia and Madeleine.
Louis retaliates by burning down the Theatre of the Vampires.

After 1862
Louis travels with Armand, then returns to New Orleans, where he claims to have seen Lestat again.
Armand leaves Louis.

After 1917
David Talbot's mortal birth.

1929
Lestat goes underground in New Orleans.
Armand takes over New Orleans as his own territory.

1950
Jesse's mortal birth.

1955
Daniel's mortal birth (or possibly two years earlier).

1975
Louis tells his story to the reporter in San Fransisco.
The reporter, Daniel, seeks out Lestat but encounters Armand.

1976
The publication of Interview with the Vampire under the pseudonym Anne Rice.

1984
Lestat rises from his coma, after hearing the music of Satan's Night Out; upon reading IV, he decides to become a rock star.

1985
Killer makes fourteen-year-old Baby Jenks a vampire; she is destroyed later that same year.
The publication of The Vampire Lestat under the pseudonym Anne Rice.
Jesse, as a member of the Talamasca, investigates the New Orleans town house and documents the vampire activities there.
Lestat's rock concert is scheduled on Halloween in San Fransisco; other vampires plot to annihilate him.
Louis reunites with Lestat.
Armand makes thirty-year-old Daniel a vampire. (He may have been thirty-two.)
Akasha awakens from her trance, destroys Enkil, buries Marius in ice, and begins her worldwide slaughter of vampires.
Mekare sends dreams to vampires worldwide about the twins and their story.
Khayman remembers who he is after a long period of amnesia, and follows Akasha to San Fransisco, where he attends Lestat's concert.
Pandora and Santino rescue Marius and accompany him to Sonoma.
Vampires gather at Lestat's rock concert; Akasha kills most of them.
Gabrielle reunites with Lestat.
Akasha abducts Lestat and with him begins her slaughter of mortal men.
Maharet makes thirty-five-year-old Jesse a vampire.
The vampires who survive Akasha's destruction gather at Sonoma.
Marius reunites with Armand.
Akasha and Lestat arrive at Sonoma.
Mekare destroys Akasha and becomes the new Queen of the Damned.
Lestat records the afformentioned events.
Lestat meets David Talbot.

1988
The publication of The Queen of the Damned.

1991
Lestat tries to end his existence.
Lestat meets Raglan James and switches bodies to become mortal again; James absconds with Lestat's vampire body, but Lestat retrives it and kills James.
Lestat makes David Talbot a vampire. David is seventy-four, but currently has the body of a twenty-six-year-old man.
Louis and David agree to live with Lestat in the New Orleans town house.

1992
The publication of The Tale of the Body Thief.

1992-1993
Louis, David, and Lestat part ways.
Lestat returns to Rio and senses his stalker.
Lestat sees Roger and starts to stalk him.

1994
Lestat discusses his stalker with David.
Lestat kills Roger, then speaks with Roger's ghost; he meets Roger's daughter, Dora.
Lestat's stalker introduces himself as Memnoch the Devil, and asks for Lestat's help.
Lestat accompanies Memnoch to Heaven and Hell. He meets God, hears the story of creation, and sees Christ's passion and the making of Veronica's veil. He visits Hell but decides against helping Memnoch. In leaving Hell, he loses his left eye to Memnoch.
Lestat gives Veronica's veil to Dora; Dora uses it to fan the flames of Christianity.
Armand destroys himself in the sun to affirm the veil's authenticity; Mael similarly destroys himself.
Dora gives St. Elizabeth's to Lestat. Maharet returns his eye and chains him to restrain him. She gives him a note from Memnoch, which thanks him for aiding him. Lestat dictates his experience with the Devil to David.
Interview with the Vampire is made into a movie staring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst.

1995
Publication of Memnoch the Devil.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland