Andrews never phoned it in. She became her characters, crying when they cried, losing weight when they starved. “We all have primal fears of being helpless, trapped in a situation beyond our control,” she said, talking about her disease; her books were about people breaking out of their prisons, finding freedom, becoming empowered. Later in that 1985 interview, Andrews was asked if her stories were autobiographical. “I don’t want to write an autobiography,” she said. “My life isn’t finished yet.”
A year later, she was dead. And yet she lived on. Andrews revived gothic horror by making fear less of a supernatural threat and more of a family affair. It would take another woman to introduce actual monsters to the new gothic. Anne Rice and her melodramatic vampires were ready to swoop in for the kill.
The Vampire Strikes Back
From their earliest appearances in literature, vampires have been jerks. Dracula was rude and smelly Eurotrash. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla was a terrible houseguest. And the less said about Varney the Vampire, the better. Then Anne Rice came along and completely overhauled their image. Sympathetic vampires had been given starring roles before, notably in Jane Gaskell’s 1964 novel The Shiny Narrow Grin, about a going-nowhere girl who falls in love with a gloomy goth vampire, or savage and seductive Barnabas Collins in the rickety ’60s soap opera Dark Shadows. But before Anne Rice took up their cause, vampire stories were told from the point of view of the people hunting them.
Rice gave vampires a voice. And then they wouldn’t shut up. Narrated by an especially whiny Louis, Interview with the Vampire (1976) was greeted with critical disdain (“suckling eroticism” crowed the New Republic, “static…pompous…superficial” proclaimed the New York Times), which hit the author hard. Rice was writing her way out of a depression after her five-year-old daughter’s death from leukemia, and she unconsciously put all her feelings of helplessness, regret, and guilt into the book. Louis was a passive victim because that’s how Rice felt when she told his story.
Despite not finding a huge audience in hardcover, Interview with the Vampire quickly sold film and paperback rights. The sequel, The Vampire Lestat (1985), did even better in hardcover, selling around 75,000 copies. By the time the third book of the trilogy, Queen of the Damned, hit shelves in 1988, Rice had become so well known that the first printing alone was 405,000 copies.
As the series progressed and Rice’s fortunes changed, so did her vampire’s voice. Lestat wasn’t a whiner. He was a rock star. Rice, who was born Howard Allen O’Brien and once described herself as a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, said that with Lestat she was writing not about who she was, but who she wanted to be. This switch to a more proactive and fearless character not only matched where the author was in her life, but it was also a shrewd move that made the sequel a hit.
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The front and back covers for the first paperback of Interview with the Vampire (opposite) felt modern, but the 1979 paperback saw H. Tom Hall, famous for his historical romance covers, go full gothic. Credit 118
Rice’s vampire trilogy is transparently autobiographical, allowing her to work through death, guilt, fear, and insecurity, emerging at the end as a fabulous superstar. Similarly, her vampires didn’t bring stench and disease like their literary predecessors; they brought beauty and culture. They were romantic gods, and nothing as tacky as a cross or a stake through the heart could kill them. Only sunlight and fire were dramatic enough to take them down.
A Bloody Legacy
Anne Rice’s vampires marked a significant transition for horror heroes. Before, the protagonists of horror fiction were blue-collar guys: Vietnam vets and salt of the earth types who staked first and asked questions later (if at all). Rice’s vampires were cultured and elegant, powerful and refined, slim hipped and long haired and given to velvet cloaks.
And they loved to talk. Before Rice’s books, vampires didn’t have much to say beyond “slurp,” but her stories are told from the undead’s point of view, using the language of confessional magazines and talk therapy. Rice’s vampires chat about their victimization, alienation, loneliness and suffering, because by talking through their feelings they can come to terms with them, and by coming to terms with them they can conquer them. These vampires cannot be monstrous or “other” because we hear their voices, and nothing that speaks to us about heartbreak, or pretty clothes, can truly be alien.
But the difference between the minor success of Interview with a Vampire and the mega success of Lestat and Queen is hard to account for. Anne Rice didn’t change how she wrote about vampires between 1976 and 1988; something bigger was going on in society. In Dracula, Renfield proclaimed, “The blood is the life!” By the time Rice published Lestat, the equation was blood = death.
Rarely has a disease engendered such fear and loathing as HIV. The term AIDS was first used in 1982, and by 1985 hundreds of parents would pull their children out of school based on rumors that an infected student might attend. Politicians proclaimed that children could “catch” the infection from a sneeze or a water fountain. Families abandoned the corpses of their dead sons in hospitals. The illness posited a future where human contact would be rare, bodily fluids poisonous.
Into the midst of this panic swooped Rice’s vampires, sexy and shimmering. Swapping blood was all the high they craved, and they humanized the notion of the other. Everything our parents were telling us was wrong: these vampires were scary but seductive, dangerous but delightful. Becoming one of them was described as receiving their “Dark Gift,” and the transfusion made them not only permanently stoned, but, as Lestat said, “more fully what we are.” You would become more fully yourself. And your real self was fabulous.
As vampires got chatty and romantic, even Dracula became a hero, both in John Shirley’s first novel and in Fred Saberhagen’s 10-volume series. Credit 119
Alienated, lonely, brooding, gothic, glam, good dancers—Rice’s vampires were everything we wanted to be. Other writers explored the possibilities, including Fred Saberhagen, who made the once-monstrous Dracula the hero of his novels. In John Shirley’s Dracula in Love (1979) that old Transylvania hillbilly was an inhuman fiend wielding a prehensile penis with glowing eyes, but he could still be tamed. In true sensitive-male fashion, he only had to meet the right lady. Halfway through the book, he falls in love with a woman who saves his life. At the climax it’s revealed that she is the living embodiment of Mother Earth and Dracula goes to her, crawling up inside her cavernous vagina while glowing like a 100-watt light bulb. Before Anne Rice, vampires killed humans. Now they got in touch with their sensitive sides while muffin-spelunking inside of them. They aren’t predators, they are, literally, a part of us.
The old-fashioned Vietnam vet, plus ’Salem’s Lot, still couldn’t create a formula capable of defeating emo vampires. Credit 120
Vampires in modern horror fiction became a powerful metaphor for our attitudes toward outsiders and the AIDS epidemic—except for Nightblood (1990), which was for people who thought ’Salem’s Lot needed more machine guns. Its protagonist, Chris Stiles, is a Vietnam vet and the ultimate divorced dad, constantly disappearing at crucial moments, leaving his woman and adopted children in peril, then reappearing at the last second with his silenced Uzi to save the day. Nightblood is so hardcore, you grow hair on your palms as you read. And it ends the only way possible: by giving Stiles a leather trench coat and a katana and reassuring us that he will continue to kill vampires forever.