So a series that Rice thought she had brought to a close is now, she says, being “reinvented or reincarnated or rebooted–I don’t know what the word is.” Rice’s first two novels featuring Lestat largely followed him around 18th century France and New Orleans, but here he’s up to date, moving among a vampire community equipped with iPhones. In the literary world, Prince Lestat is saving the undead from banality and overfamiliarity. Prince Lestat the character is helping save his kind from extinction. For all that Rice purports to admire about True Blood and Twilight, it’s hard not to see some deeper meaning in Lestat’s return. (Rice says she listened to his music every morning as she showered when she was writing Lestat she also dedicated the book to him, among others.) But when this book opens we find Lestat in self-imposed exile, which he leaves only to unite the world’s vampires against potential destruction. In some of the earlier volumes, Rice’s bratty, glamorous bloodsucker has been moonlighting as a rock star inspired by Jon Bon Jovi. Now, after more than a decade away from vampires, she is revisiting the genre for which she is best known with Prince Lestat, the 11th in her Vampire Chronicles series. And I thought, Wow, that never interested me.”īesides, Rice says she stopped watching the show once she returned to supernatural fiction in 2012 with a werewolf tale, The Wolf Gift. “They made him the guy next door, the guy at the corner bar. True Blood “domesticated the vampire,” she says. She only got around to watching Twilight this summer, and although she says she found HBO’s True Blood “pretty funny,” as a writer famous for her broodingly sensitive immortals who are more at home in European capitals than in casual dives, she doesn’t understand the more down-market bloodsuckers. Not that Rice sees much of her approach to vampires reflected in the popular breeds of the 21st century.

Anne rice vampire novels