Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat

[andydecker]

Anne Rice – The Vampire Lestat (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, this edition Futura, 1986, 600 pages)

One tends to forget, but the second of Rice's vampire novels was published almost a decade later after Interview. In the meantime she wrote a few erotic novels under pseudonyms.

This one is truly bloated with 600 pages, a rather undramatic trip through time, with some strange plot twists as when Lestat vampirizes his mother to make her immortal or when he becomes a rock star.

It invited quite a few parodies over the time; one of the best is still the one in Preacher by Garth Ennis. In the one-shot Blood and Whiskey his vampire Cassidy meets a Lestat wannabe in New Orleans who calls himself Eccarious and says: Yeh're a wanker, aren't yeh?

 

[dem bones]

Interview with a Vampire was the only one I finished - really couldn't see that it justified the hype, but neither did I find it interesting enough to particularly dislike. The Vampire Lestat (abandoned roughly halfway through) I DETESTED, mainly for spawning a plague of "sympathetic," reasonable, immaculately groomed (trans: mulleted) oh-so-intellectual vampires in velvet and frilly shirts who came on like yuppies and always smelled ever so nice — no matter they slept in a box of soil and maggots. And wasn't it Lestat started all that 'Chronicles' nonsense?

However, I shall always be grateful to the late Mrs Rice for inspiring Tom Strauss's Children of the Night and their The Coven Journal, Lestat (criminally underrated industrial band), Arabella Randolph's extraordinary The Vampire Tapes, and a number of my most loved vampire 'zines from the late eighties through to the mid-nineties.

Not read any Garth Ennis but having read your post I'm a fan of this Cassidy fellow.

[andydecker]

Dec 19, 2023 20:31:58 GMT dem bones said:

Not read any Garth Ennis but having read your post I'm a fan of this Cassidy fellow.

Some choice outtakes of Cassidy. And because they are funny.

Artwork by the late Steve Dillon.

[helrunar]

Funny. I wonder the Cassidy comic (was it a novel first?) inspired that What we do in the shadows film and series? 

Thanks for sharing!

Steve

[andydecker]

Dec 19, 2023 22:26:18 GMT helrunar said:

Funny. I wonder the Cassidy comic (was it a novel first?) inspired that What we do in the shadows film and series? 

Thanks for sharing!

Steve

No novel. Cassidy the vampire was one of three main characters of Garth Ennis' series Preacher, 66 issues and a couple of one-shots after it became a success, 1995 to 2000 at DC Vertigo. Artist for the whole run was also Steve Dillon. What is seen here is the style of the series. I had followed Ennis' work before, and it was one of those must-buys back then when monthly comics were no luxury articles.

I re-read parts this years and still liked it. The elements I thought ho-hum I already thought ho-hum in the 90s, so it aged pretty well, and as it is often the case with these kind of series it was 10 issues too long and the ending was a bit meh. The usual. Considering that a lot  of the elements would be thought too risque (again) today, it is still unique.

[helrunar]

Preacher became a television series in the US on the American Movie Classics (AMC) channel. Don't know if it got any play in Europe. I never saw it but I think a friend may have watched at least one season of it. 

I'd completely forgotten about this but then something or other reminded me of it and I looked it up. An actor named Joseph Gilgun played Cassidy. I imagine there was some watering down for the US viewing public.

cheers, Steve

[David A. Riley]

Cassidy was the best of some great characters in Preacher, which is surely one of the barmiest if enjoyable fantasy series ever. His vampire should be regarded as a classic and was genuinely idiosyncratic.