Reflections on an audiobook revisitation, character retcons, and a podcast recommendation.
Translate all that to mean this: We have no money to launch a real ecclesiastical career for you, to make you a bishop or cardinal as befits our rank, so you have to live out your life here as an illiterate and a beggar. Come in the great hall and play chess with your father.
The Vampire Lestat
Lestat was my first book boyfriend, and it’s been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve kind of sat down with him, given how obsessed I was in my teen years/early adolescence. That’s just testament to how much time has passed and how much we change over the years.
Listening to these books for the first time in over 15 years after having read them repeatedly through high school and college, I’m easily falling back into old patterns and find myself both swooning and rolling my eyes over Lestat’s antics, and I’m only in chapter two at this point (I listen on my hour-long commute to and from work, M-F).
For me, Lestat was a way of doing and saying things I was too scared to do or say way back when. Vampires in general for me were a way to imagine myself with power I never thought I’d be able to have on my own. I’m sure there’s a whole psychological expose I could get into on it, but suffice to say I was very quiet, shy, and afraid of my own burgeoning sexuality and this way a way for me to see myself doing things that I wanted to do but was decidedly frightened of doing.
I wish I could tell you things have changed in the 20+ years since then, but alas, they haven’t. I’ve mostly stopped relying (completely) on vampires to live out those fantasies, and while I’ve come into my own as a person and woman somewhat, I feel like it’s more because I’m just fucking fed up with the world and the bullshit than anything. Lestat as a character was someone I both wanted to be with and wanted to be. I think Anne Rice herself has said as much herself.
It’s interesting coming back to a series that was such an integral part of my life after so long a time. “Interview”, while a seminal part of this series, was never my favorite because Louis was never my favorite. I think I glommed on to Lestat much more from the jump, even though I was way more like Louis in every way. I know I thought back then, after having read about Lestat’s experience afterward, that you’re able to see flashes of the character he would become even in that first book, and I still get that sense, but I wonder how much this would be considered a complete character retcon.
I’m thinking specifically of my experience with watching Spike in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and reading about Tamlin in “A Court of Thorns and Roses” and “A Court of Mist and Fury” – two properties that came out decades apart but gave me very similar experiences. It’s interesting to see Lestat’s change through the lens of my opinion on Spike and Tamlin.
I’ve wrote at length on this blog and on my Tumblr (www.tumblr.com/morwen1031) about how dismayed I was with the reconstruction/deconstruction of Tamlin’s character, which was similar in feeling to me, though reverse in method (i.e. Tamlin goes from hero to zero while Spike does the opposite). In both cases, something I had initially loved had essentially been taken from me and that subsequently tainted my ability to go back and enjoy even the bits that I loved.
I feel like Lestat’s transformation, so to speak, from “Interview” to the rest of the books, while technically a retcon, wasn’t negative in the way that Tamlin and Spike were. Interestingly enough, the way that Sarah J. Maas methodically breaks down literally every positive thing Tamlin did in ACOTAR to make him the villain moving forward very much harkens back to how Rice transforms Lestat from the villain to the hero now that I’m finally re-experiencing Lestat telling his own story. I guess it would be more appropriate to say that his journey more accurately mirrors Rhysand’s transformation from villain to hero, but I despise Rhysand and all that the character represents and alludes to (again, discussed at length both here and on tumblr), so I’d really rather not talk about him in the same breath as Lestat.
I think the differences though are that Lestat isn’t doing a complete 180 here. He’s villainous and a jerk in “Interview” but has his moments of charm (Louis even says as much), and that’s still present in “The Vampire Lestat” and beyond. The similarities, however, are most obvious where Lestat tells us that he actually prefers killing evildoers, and some of the people that to Louis were killed in cold blood were real evildoers, etc. I’m not sure if this is something Anne felt she had to do in order to make Lestat more palatable as a hero, and the audience less guilty for loving a guy that’s essentially a murderer. I feel confident in saying that Sarah J. Maas felt that she needed to justify Rhysand’s transformation in ACOMAF by “re-examining” quite literally every bad thing we see him do in ACOTAR from a new perspective.
So yeah, Anne does do that on some level, but it never comes off as egregious as it does with Maas and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that Lestat is still unapologetically bad in so many ways as you move through the rest of the Vampire Chronicles. So much so that it hardly seems worth trying to condone some of his earlier kills. He was a charming asshole in “Interview” and he’s pretty much the same thing in subsequent books. Louis actually goes through the greater transformation, having been so thoroughly wishy washy over everything in “Interview” to killing without discrimination and making fledglings without compunction.
That’s neither here nor there though, since I was primarily concerned with whether or not Lestat’s evolution can be considered a retcon, which in my view has generally negative connotations. I don’t believe it does, for a few reasons – First, as I said before, he’s essentially still the same asshole in TVL we know and love to hate in IwtV; Second, a lot of those changes are almost necessitated by the narrative in that in order to tell the story as she envisioned, Anne needed to explain away a few things (i.e. Louis finding Lestat trying to eat a baby towards the end of the first book). These are really plot-driven requirements more than character-driven ones, which matters.
To put it in perspective with Maas’ changes, the plot of ACOMAF could have quite easily remained almost exactly as it did without having to make Rhys a literal paragon of heroism; Lestat physically couldn’t have been where he was in TVL if Louis really had seen him in that decrepit mansion, however. If you know Anne Rice and her disdain for editors, you have to look at some of changes as her straight up forgetting what happened previously and refusing the help of people that might have been able to remind her of much. I think Maas felt like the readership wouldn’t accept Rhys as a hero with dark spots in past, whereas Anne accepted the fact that Lestat was awesome in spite of these things. I’m glad about that because people aren’t black and white (and yes, I know we’re talking vampires here but I’m speaking in terms of allegory) so her characters wind up being way more identifiable to us readers as everyday humans than anything Maas could ever construct. To the latter, if you did something bad you better have a good reason for it. To the former, you might have done something bad, and you might have a good reason for it, but let’s be honest you’re probably going to do something bad again at some point and I don’t owe you an explanation anyway because I’m a self-aware motherfucker and I know you’ll love me no matter what.
So while Rice as an author might make mistakes that necessitate an explanation or two, her characters themselves don’t make excuses and are exceedingly self-aware and unapologetic when it comes to bad behavior, and that’s what I love most about Lestat, which I’m just starting to rediscover via the audiobooks now.
It’s a little hard to find current content on Anne Rice’s works, both because it stretches back so far and because she’s now passed on, but we’re seeing a small resurgence with AMC’s version of Lestat and Louis’ story. I recommend both that show (Sam Reid is just stellar) and The Articulate Coven podcast, which looks at all of Rice’s works as well as the currently-airing show.
Keep It To Your Shelf 