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"I knew that I had come to the most forsaken outpost of the Savage Garden, and that this was my country and I would remain in New Orleans, if New Orleans could only manage to remain. Whatever I suffered should be lessened in this lawless place, whatever I craved should give me more pleasure once I had it in my grasp.

And there were moments on that first night in this fetid little paradise when I prayed that in spite of all my secret power, I was somehow kin to every mortal man. Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul."

The Vampire Lestat ~ Anne Rice

The City in Louisiana mentioned in each of The Chronicles, it is a location for much of the action. Because of its multicultural milieu, New Orleans is both a metaphor of, and the perfect setting for, vampires, Louis views New Orleans as a "dream held intact... by a tenacious, though unconcious, collective will." A unique city of frivolity, superstition, contradiction, and sensuality, it serves as a magnet to vampires, who feel at home here.

Founded in 1699 with a cross staked on a bend along the Mississippi River, New Orleans was officially settled by a Canadian-born Frenchman in 1718. It is unique among American cities in its cultural history and population.

The first residents of the city were misfits from French prisons, along with whores and "casket girls" - women the Ursuline nuns brought over, who carried their belongings in caskets. Then came aristocrats, merchants, and farmers, followed by Acadians from Nova Scotia, who made up the population called Cajun. When King Louis XIV gave the city to Spain in 1762, Spanish bred with French, and the descendants became known as Creoles. The city went back under France's rule in 1800, then came into American hands three years later. Americans settled in the Garden District, and Irish and German immigrants began to pour in, along with people from the Caribbean, some of whom were slaves and some of whom were free people of colour.

For much of its history, New Orleans had a reputation as a city of open vice; it was easy to access gambling, "bawdy houses," and numerous saloons. The spirit of the city was lively and colourful, and, despite the srong presence of the Catholic church, crime was rampant. The citizens were, paradoxically, fun-loving yet repentant, imparting an atmosphere of ambiguity and contradiction. They loved stability and tradition as well as change, took both religion and corruption in stride, and honoured their dead in high style.

New Orleans is home to Rice. She was born and raised there, until she was forced to move at the age of fifteen with her family to Texas. She went on from there to San Fransisco, but after twenty-seven years, she returned to her native city.

"It was very important for me to come back to New Orleans," she says. "I wanted to be around the colours and textures, the shapes and smells, that I had experienced as a child. I felt homeless in California."

Lestat is the very first vampire to enter this city. He views it as the most forsaken outpost of the Savage Garden, a reflection of his own primitive nature. He goes there to join his blind, aging father after the French Revolution has wiped out the rest of their family. "As time passed," he says, "I came to love it [New Orleans] more than any spot on the globe." He appreciates its smells, colours, even its dampness. The lawlessness of such a place, he feels diminishes his suffering as a vampire and increases his pleasure. Here he is not an ousider, but "the dim magnification of every human soul."

Lestat meets Louis in New Orleans and half of Louis's story is set here. Prior to becoming a vampire, Louis lives south of the city on a plantation. He remains on this plantation as a vampire, until its slaves drive him away. He then moves to the oldest outpost of the city, the French Quarter, where he lives with Lestat for sixty-five years. Louis then leaves New Orleans with Claudia to seek out other vampires, but returns to his hometown after Claudia's death. In IV, Louis describes New Orleans as a "magical and magnificent" place in which a vampire, "richly dressed and gracefully walking through the pools of light of one gas lamp after another might attract no more notice in the evening than hundreds of other exotic creatures." While Louis does live in San Fransisco for a while, after the rock concert and the confrontation with Akasha he settles again in New Orleans, in a shack behind one of the Victorian mansions in the Uptown area.

Armand, too, comes to New Orleans in the company of Louis, and it is where the two of them end their intimate association. Armand grows bored and even feels he may be dying, but ultimately he claims New Orleans as his exclusive hunting ground for most of the twentieth century, killing any young vampires who venture too near. Eventually he connects with Daniel, who has come to New Orleans in search of Lestat's house.

After the publication of VL, Jesse arrives in the city to investigate for the Talamasca the vampires' properties. To her psychically attuned mind the city seems to possess a haunted and sinister quality.

Dora Flynn lives in New Orleans, in St. Elizabeth's Orphanage on Napoleon Street. Her home is based on the former Catholic orphanage that Rice bought and is currently renovating. Lestat comes here to show himself to Dora. He also returns here when, after his ordeal with the Devil and his delivery of Veronica's veil, Dora relinquishes the building to him.

Dora grew up in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, despite her father's wish that she live in the heart of New Orleans, where the houses have more character. Roger himself had grown up in an old house on St. Charles Avenue, near the Garden District.

After stalking Lestat for nearly a year, Memnoch meets Lestat in his town house on Royal Street. He claims that he needs Lestat, who then goes to City Park at the end of Esplanade Avenue to discuss the situation with Armand and David.

The City also houses one of the vampire bars.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland

Since it has been introduced as a home for vampires, New Orleans has emerged as the true American vampire city. While many different American cities, especially New York and Los Angeles, have provided locations for vampire stories, none have become so identified with the nocturnal creatures as has the Crescent City. The association is not from a history of vampire incidents in the city's folklore. There is certainly a vampire figure, the fifollet in the folklore of the African Americans of Louisiana, and the loogaroo, a variation on the West African vampire found among the Haitian slaves who came into the city in the early nineteenth century, but only two vampire stories can actually be traced to the city. One of those involved two serial killers in the 1930's who drank blood from their victims before killing them. The city's reputation for vampires has purely modern roots, and can be found in the writings of Anne Rice, especially Interview with the Vampire, the second most popular vampire book of all time, which sets much of the action in New Orleans. Throughout the 1990's, a number of other authors have also enjoyed success with New Orleans vampires.

New Orleans is a unique place on the American landscape, and an appropriate setting for vampires. It was the center of voudou, a religion practiced in secret during the night by the slaves who build a different culture in order to survive away from their homeland. New Orleans also stands as a foreign enclave within a country dominated by English-speaking British influence. In the French Quarter, New Orleans is also a land separated from the present by its unique architecture and heritage.

The Vampire Book (The Encyclopedia of the Undead) ~ J. Gordon Melton