The Vampire Chronicles
The Vampire Chronicles is a series of novels and a media franchise created by American writer Anne Rice that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century.
Interview with the Vampire (1976) was made into a 1994 film starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and Kirsten Dunst. 1988’s The Queen of the Damned was adapted into a 2002 film of the same name, starring Stuart Townsend and Aaliyah and using some material from 1985’s The Vampire Lestat. In August 2014, Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment acquired the motion picture rights to the entire series, but Rice announced that she had regained them in November 2016. A television series adaptation of the novels for streaming service Hulu was announced in July 2018, but these rights expired in December 2019. In May 2020, it was announced that AMC had acquired the rights to both The Vampire Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches for developing film and television projects.
Rice said in a 2008 interview that her vampires were a “metaphor for lost souls”. The homoerotic overtones of The Vampire Chronicles are also well-documented. As of November 2008, The Vampire Chronicles had sold 80 million copies worldwide.
Rice considered Blood Canticle a conclusion to the series and thought she would never write about Lestat again.[1] In a 2008 interview with Time, she called her vampires a “metaphor for lost souls”, and noted that writing about them had been, to her, “a sort of search for God and a kind of grief for a lost faith.” Her 1998 return to the Catholic Church after 38 years of atheism had prompted a change in the direction of her writing that resulted in her 2005 novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and its 2008 sequel Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.[2]
However, in the same interview, Rice said: “I have one more book that I would really like to write; and the book will have a definite Christian framework and it will concern the vampire Lestat; and it will be a story I think I need to tell. But it will have to be in a redemptive framework. It will have to be where Lestat is really wrestling with the existence of God in a very personal way.”[2] That same year she produced a YouTube video in which she told her readers that she had dismissed any intentions of writing any more books in The Vampire Chronicles, calling the series “closed”.[3] Later, during a 2012 Q&A in Toronto, Canada, an audience member asked Rice if she would bring any of her old characters back, to which she replied: “I’m not ruling it out. I think it’s very possible. I mean, I feel completely open with a new confidence in myself about it. I want to hear what Lestat has to say.”[4] On March 10, 2014, Rice announced a new installment of The Vampire Chronicles titled Prince Lestat, calling it the first of a new series.[1][5] Prince Lestat was released on October 28, 2014.[6] A sequel, Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, was released on November 29, 2016,[7] followed by Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat on October 2, 2018.[8]
Lestat has awakened Akasha, the first of all vampires, who has in her thousands of years of immobility, contrived an idealized way to achieve world peace, by killing almost all males and destroying all other vampires. She is herself destroyed by the vampire witch Mekare, who has awakened and returned after 6,000 years to fulfill a promise to destroy Akasha at the moment she poses the greatest threat.
