Interview with the Vampire (part 6)

Can an un-dead vampire die and then come back to life? Technically speaking, I think not, because to rise from the dead one has to be dead first, and since vampires are the "un-dead," they're neither dead nor alive. But miraculously, Lestat has risen from whatever "state of death" he was in and came back to kill Louis... I think. I'm not really sure why he doesn't attack Claudia. She was the one who "killed" him, after all. But maybe he blames Louis because he didn't help him.

Claudia and Louis had been making plans to go to Europe to search out more vampires even before Lestat had "died." (Ugh, I am now forced to put "died" in quotation marks...) So when he came back to their apartment, to get rid of him (and his musician friend whom he had turned into a vampire as well... Who knew?) Louis threw a candelabra on him, causing the whole apartment to burn. We're never told the extent of the damage because once Louis is out of Lestat's grasp, he and Claudia flee to the docks, where they, oh so conveniently, were due to catch their ship that dawn.

Once in Europe, Claudia heads the mission on finding the other vampires. Louis, however, doesn't really care: He'd rather sightsee. This is just another way in which Louis shows off his more human tendencies. They don't end up finding real vampires, just some brain dead zombie-esque vampires that just kill all willy-nilly and don't have any mental faculties whatsoever.

But it still just really bothers me that Louis is so intent on retaining his mortal qualities while both Claudia and Lestat seemed perfectly capable of forgetting theirs altogether. And the relationship between Claudia and Louis is very strange indeed. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether they love each other as father and daughter or as... something else. It seems that vampires can only feel one way or the other about their own kind: Absolute loathing or unadulterated love.

(Since I started this post, I've actually finished the book and seen the movie, so I'll do one last blog about how I thought the end was and then move on to my next nonfiction book, Escape. But I'll talk about that more later.)