To catch up with today's vampire mythos, I finally got around to reading Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. After seeing the movie numerous times over the years, you think it would have hit my reading pile sooner, but no.
As far as my pet peeve with movies "based on" books sometimes being really out there and just borrowing the characters' names and the settings, I was impressed to see that the movie didn't stray that far from it. Granted, reading about Louis' mental dilemmas instead of seeing Brad Pitt in anguish on the screen was a little dry until he and Claudia kill Lestat and go to Europe, it was intriguing to get more behind it. While the prose was a bit flowery and purple for me sometimes as opposed to my favourite authors styles, it is a well-written book and the scenes come alive in your head. After my slow start, I plowed through the remainder of the book.
The ending surprised me a little, since it was where the movie went slightly different. While Pitt's anguish in the early scenes was slightly believable, I get none of the deadness that Louis emits once he's lost Claudia and anything "human" he'd been trying to hold onto. Rice's description of Louis' existence after that episode was very vivid and the most frightening part of the book because to be that dark inside would be creepy.
While definitely better than the Twilight series vampires, I do see where some of the more modern vampire stereotypes arose from, but because of that impact on the world, it's worth the read just to see what the hype is and to broaden one's vampire repertoire.
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