Fans of Lestat and of Undead TV must surely be celebrating today. I heard through Vanity Fair that Anne Rice is bringing her Vampire Chronicles to television. After regaining the rights to the series, the author and her son Christopher are writing a pilot script together. Lestat really is the most compelling of all vampires, a genuine existentialist and rock star. Satan-like he is always deliciously soliloquising on his own ambivalent evil and he definitely has all the best lines. I am looking forward to discussing Rice with my ‘Reading the Vampire’ MA students in January.
Here are some of my favourite quotes to get you in the mood:
“I’m Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”
“The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty’s dead.”
“To be godless is probably the first step to innocence,” he said, “to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost.”So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions.” An absence of need for illusions,” he said. “A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”
