Anne Rice
Intervista col vampiro

I find that the evolution of the vampire in literature rather well describes the cultural devolution that humanity has undergone from the late 1800s to today. Or maybe not, but catastrophism has something romantic about it. Like vampires, for instance. So, we have moved from the cruel Dracula of Stoker, an icon of evil and perversion (the continuous sexual innuendos inserted in the novel are a well-known fact) to the Swarovski vampires of Meyer, whose literary respectability hovers around the levels of this here in relation to music. How could this happen? I believe I have an answer, and whether you are interested or not, I will give it to you. Oh yes, I will give it to you! and we will all enjoy it as if we were freshly licked stamps.

STEP 1. Dracula, I was saying, is the beginning of everything. Sure, there was Polidori's little novel before, which I haven't read and only know in outlines, but it is undeniable that the first great vampire novel (or perhaps the only one?) is Stoker's masterpiece. As for Stoker, we can say that the vampire possessed the following attributes at the time: 1) he was ugly, animalistic, but at the same time elegant and aristocratic. He was powerful, wicked, satanic. He was perverse. Or at least so it seemed to someone like Stoker, who hadn’t had his wife for a long time and sought to vent his libido by going to prostitutes, only to feel like shit afterward. Obviously, this is not the only interpretation of Stoker's Dracula, but I like to think that the author poured his adulterous paranoias onto poor Dracula and finally had him destroyed by the upstanding society he feared he was no longer part of. Because I'm a romantic type, of course. The fact is, incredible as it may seem, in Dracula, psychological introspection is totally absent. We never know what he thinks or why he acts; he is just a device, a script. A kind of bad and aberrant ogre that must be eliminated. Only one person, in the entire book, seems at the end to feel (even for a short time) a bit of pity for this hideous creature, comparing it to a hunted animal, and that is Mina Harker.

STEP 2. Mina Harker, I was saying, is the sequel to everything. One day, in fact, a certain Francis Ford Coppola, moved by pity for poor Dracula, with the conscience of a century round and after several social and sexual revolutions, recalls the (momentary) pity shown by young Mina Harker and decides to honor her by turning Stoker's Dracula into a buttery story of love and revenge, where said girl will be the reincarnation of the blood-sucking count's ex-flame, unjustly dead by suicide due to a misunderstanding, and the main cause of the count's vampiric transformation. It's also possible that Coppola built this romantic version of the events starting from a brief sentence pronounced by Dracula himself to his three castle whores, namely: "Yes, I too know how to love, and you yourself have had proof of this in the past. Is it not so?" (confession of Stoker himself in the guise of Dracula? well, who cares).

STEP 3. And here we finally are with our beloved Anne Rice! hallelujah! okay everyone stop: I know. Interview with the Vampire was written a good twenty years before Coppola's interpretation, but then why do I place it as the third step? the answer is simple: Rice simply glimpsed in Dracula the same romantic aspect of the vampire figure that Coppola saw, an aspect that was only hinted at in the original text and submerged by waves of intense puritanism, and she brought this side to its ultimate consequence, twenty years before Coppola and, alas, in a much more drastic way. But so very much drastic. I'll try to explain myself better. Let's remember what Stoker's Dracula was like: ugly, animal-like, sinister. Certainly without pity. Well, Rice said to herself, to hell with all that! and went back to Polidori's seducer, which is to say the vampire must be handsome, an unbelievably hot guy, he must be a beautiful and damned man! but that's not enough: and so, losing his humanity, year after year, decade after decade, this modern vampire will have to start reflecting on all the miseries of our dear contemporaneity: loneliness, the loss of values, the death of God. Seems cool, doesn't it? a philosophical novel about diversity, the search for the meaning of life, an existentialist novel! but also NO.

Interview with the Vampire is an unbelievably absurd boring novel and Anne Rice is probably one of the most overrated authors currently existing on the planet. 9 euros for the book, 9 euros taken and flushed down the toilet. I should have guessed how much the author was actually worth just by looking at her face on the internet, or I should have listened to my vampiric sixth sense when faced with that terribly green cover so freaking homosexual, I was tempted to give it up. Nothing against gays, obviously, but this book was written by a woman and is clearly targeted at women (a certain type of women, at least), so perhaps it might also appeal to a rather effeminate audience. Because when all is said and done, it is nothing more than a romance novel that has been washed in the washing machine with a lot of dark stuff, so that it comes out very dirty and black, but at the end of the ride, there's no ifs and buts: it remains a romance novel. But I don't want to seem cruel for no reason, so let's examine the main flaws of this award-winning author:

1) the plot. My God help me. 300 pages where nothing bloody happens, where the reader is forcibly made to endure the numerous mental riffs of the new vampire Louis and read between one yawn and another about his luxurious mundane life with the unscrupulous (and obviously beautiful) Lestat, and with the little doll Claudia. Oh look, in the last 100 pages there's an absurd twist, this book is a masterpiece! no, to hell with it.

2) the style. My God guide my words. You know the definition of "verbosity"? well, if you still have doubts and want to delve into the topic, buy this book. Or save yourself the money and try to make it to the end of the review, as I'm quite verbose too. In any case, it's like this, Rice has a fake baroque style, fake deep, fake interesting. Effect words places a bit everywhere, so detectable they evoke tenderness. Just as the protagonists seem made of plastic and porcelain, all beautiful as in a Japanese anime, so too the depth of Louis's thoughts seems fake, contrived. Not a memorable phrase, something that remains, nothing at all. And the thing is all the more serious if you consider that in the narrative's economy, a good 70% is based on the protagonist's bloody mental upheavals, and the remaining 30% is devoted to the actual plot.

3) The incredibly low number of characters involved in the story. It will seem like nonsense but I have never seen anything like it in my life, never. It's always those three, always and only those three. Then they become four. Then three, then two, then you don't understand but who cares. They do nothing but mentally masturbate, kill, and fall in love with each other, males with little girls, little girls with males who are females who love males who love other males engaged with little girls. But if I had wanted to read a romance, I would have borrowed one from my aunt who has the whole collection. Certainly, I would have missed the dark and sick side of the matter, but call me retro, in a vampire novel I would have gladly done without all this sentimentality that, in reality, too well betrays the presence of a woman at the helm.

I realize that according to this review, I might seem extremely homophobic and misogynist. I do not apologize because I am neither and never will be. Anne Rice simply brought out the worst that could be brought out from vampires. A forced and too human sentimentality where a vampire should be a dark and diabolical creature, aiming to destroy our certainties and destabilize the self-righteous. Kudos to her for giving thought and depth to the vampire where Dracula was just a caricature, but she really went overboard. Paradoxically, while with Stoker the vampire did not yet have a point of view, now it has too many. In this aspect, I much preferred John Lindqvist in "Let the Right One In", who, despite not having given up the sentimental plot and the psychological depth of his vampire, left intact the horror component. At least that.

STEP 4. And here we are at the end of this endless piece of writing. Only Twilight is missing, the twilight of gothic literature. Started with Rice, retouched (with certain skill) by Coppola, dirtied up by numerous action films, the frou-frou sentiment has finally triumphed even among the diabolical bloodsuckers and now moves to the school desks, accompanied by muscular werewolves and impotent vampires. I'm so excited to know what the fifth step will be that to while away the wait I will go quickly to lick some stamps.

PS: I thank a certain Caccamo for introducing me to this, now this is seriousness damn it.