Leigh Bardugo Makes the Case for Lestat's Immortality at 50

Fifty years after its publication, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire still sets the standard for every new entry in the vampire canon, according to novelist Leigh Bardugo — and she believes its antihero, Lestat, has already achieved the status of legend.

Writing in a tribute essay marking the novel's half-century, Bardugo argues that no formula explains why certain characters lodge in the collective consciousness. "If I knew the alchemy by which a character, a world, or a mythology lodges in our collective consciousness, I would deploy it myself," she writes.

The 50th Anniversary Edition of Interview with the Vampire is available now.

Why does Bardugo think Lestat belongs beside Dracula?

Bardugo, author of the Grishaverse novels, places Rice's creation in a very small pantheon. "It is Lestat who has entered our canon of legendary monsters beside Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein and his creation," she writes.

Her case rests on the novel's persistence in critical comparison. "Take a look at the reviews of any new entry into the vampire canon, and you will almost always see comparisons to Interview with the Vampire—and usually, even fifty years on, these new works are deemed to have come up short," she notes.

She allows that the reasons remain unknowable. Maybe it is Rice's grounding of the novels in history, her mastery of atmosphere, or the way she "wrestles with the moral questions posed by immortality in such deeply human ways."

What role did grief play in the novel's creation?

Bardugo traces the book's origin to Rice's own loss. In interviews, Rice acknowledged the novel as a response to the death of her daughter, Michele, whom she lost to leukemia. Claudia, often understood as Michele's avatar, is the child vampire Louis had to love, lose and grieve for Rice to attain any kind of catharsis.

For Bardugo, the vampire is not only a metaphor for plague and bodily corruption. It is also a metaphor for grief: "You're gone, but I see you still, hear you still, love you still," she writes. Grief, in her telling, behaves exactly like the undead — it does not die, even as we do.

She situates Rice within a long folklore tradition tied to anxieties about death and disease, from the Church's first-century efforts to stop the desecration of feared corpses, to the vampire panics accompanying rabies and pellagra outbreaks in the 1700s, to Bram Stoker's Dracula, partly inspired by his mother's stories of the cholera outbreak she survived in Sligo.

How does the book seduce its readers?

Bardugo's central claim is that reading Rice collapses the distance between reader and monster. "To read Anne Rice is to become both vampire and victim," she writes.

Rice's vampires descend from Stoker's Count and John William Polidori's Lord Ruthven: seductive, intelligent, moody, philosophical. When the sequel The Vampire Lestat arrived nearly ten years after the original, some readers were scandalized that Lestat could become the hero of his own book. Bardugo finds this obvious rather than transgressive — the reader, like Louis and the reporter, is being seduced.

She observes a curious effect among the novel's readership: "No matter when or where we first encounter this novel, we somehow feel we are the first to discover it." The intimacy of that experience, she argues, is part of Rice's sorcery.

What does immortality mean for the author?

Bardugo closes with the essay's sharpest formulation. In a text that manages to be "both grandiose and intimate," Rice works the mysterious alchemy of creating permanence: "character becomes legend; author becomes icon."

Her final image is vampiric in itself. Rice offers readers a glimpse of the eternal, and with that invitation, Bardugo writes, "in glorious vampiric fashion, she seizes immortality for herself."

Whether Lestat endures as Dracula and Hamlet have done is a verdict no living reader can render, as Bardugo concedes. Her wager, fifty years on, is that he already has.