I read this book first when I was like 14 to impress my brother’s friend Scott. He was into Nine Inch Nails and Pantera and he played a bunch of Sega/SNES RPGs and so anyway, yeah, you read some Vampire novels if you want to be in Scott’s good graces.
So it read it then. And when I started my Goodreads twenty years later I gave this a 3/5 based on my memory of it. But I was wrong. It’s just good. It really is, and it holds up. I loved the movie when I that age, so it shouldn’t surprise me that I liked the novel still a lot as I got older.
I listened to the audiobook, so that helped a lot. And it was read by Simon Vance, and that helped a LOT.
But the book itself is a meditation of the changing of the world in the last 200 hundred years. It focuses a lot on modernity issues of buildings and technology and concepts of intimacy and eternity. So basically it’s a novel about everything. It’s also kind of about solipsism. If you are a vampire and you have lived forever, and there is no one else like you, it’s impossible to see your existence as anything but all there is.
The novel itself falls into some small cliched language at times, but Anne Rice knows what she is doing. So it works.
Also, at one point Louis mentions “Color and the Shape” of something, and it made me think of the Foo Fighters album and how much that played into who High School Vel Veeters was huh. Trips down memory lane indeed.
I never did read the follow-up novels so maybe that’s my next step.