On Inspiration and Anniversaries

On my bookshelf of notable reads is a first edition of Anne Rice’s seminal novel, Interview With The Vampire. I consider it one of my most treasured possessions.

Published in 1976, the story follows Louis du Point du Lac as he retells his two-hundred-year life as a vampire to a reporter in present-day San Francisco. Already an avid reader and lover of horror novels, I devoured this book knowing that she had changed the genre forever, reimagining the vampire as intelligent, sexy, and very human. They were handsome, wealthy, well-read, and at the same time territorial, prone to jealous rages, and oh yes, predators of the highest order. I won’t recount here her far-reaching influence on the writers who came after her; I will only share how her novel impacted me.

I read everything she wrote about vampires and witches, and I admit she influenced my own writing. Thirty-four years later, I published Immortal Obsession, the first novel in The Enchanted Blood Line Series, which recounts the plight of French vampire Christian Du Mauré and his best friend Michel Baptiste.

It’s no surprise they are French and live first in Paris and now in New York. They are handsome, intelligent, wealthy, and like Louis du Point du Lac, Christian is mournful, lonely, and forever doubting his choice to follow Michel into the world of darkness. He did so for all the wrong reasons and lives with this choice every day.

Interview With The Vampire celebrates its 50th anniversary this October and is being republished on October 6th, two days after what would have been the author’s 85th birthday. (She died in 2021.) Ironically, I am months away from publishing a novella specifically about Christian and his life and losses in eighteenth-century France. None of this would have been possible without Anne Rice and her magnetic vampires, Lestat and Louis.