Bloodsucking is not a free ride. The drawbacks of being a vampire extend beyond draughty castles, unsociable hours, an overly formal dress code and the occasional mob of torch-wielding peasants. From John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre (1819), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and beyond, ancient vampires, laden with ennui, have been forced to confront changing sexual mores and bewildering new technologies that hold the potential to destroy them.
The undead in Anne Rice’s latest instalment of her Vampire Chronicles, Prince Lestat, are troubled and entranced by the digital age. The once sparse vampire population has exploded and “blood drinkers with picture-capturing iPhones; satellite mobiles ... better than telepathy” are everywhere. They have upgraded their music collections to CD, embraced flat-screen television and learned how to email, blog and broadcast via digital radio but, as many celebrities have discovered, it is hard to remain legendary in a world saturated in social media. The children of the night can no longer rely on remote chateaus, dense forests and icy reaches to conceal their presence. They might even find themselves being papped.
Anne Rice’s 1976 debut Interview with the Vampire introduced the mercurial Lestat de Lioncourt and his reluctant companion, the equally sexy, but rather squeamish, Louis de Pointe du Lac. These were fallible vampires, forced to explore their own ethics and to realise the necessity of death and grief. The novel demanded sympathy for the poor devils and transfused the genre with exciting new blood.
Rice went on to write more than 20 books, involving crisscrossing realms and beings. Prince Lestat endeavours to bring these worlds and characters together in one volume. A glossary detailing 50-plus individuals, excluding “assorted unnamed fledglings, ghosts and spirits” is included at the end for anyone (I imagine that is everyone) who might get confused.
The vampire world is under attack from “the Voice”, a disturbed telepathic force, which commands mass burnings of fledgling vampires. Massacres take place across the globe. The children of the night call on the most famous vampire of all, “brat prince” Lestat, to help them unite and defeat the Voice, before it manipulates them into annihilating each other. Selfish and vain, Lestat is an unlikely saviour, but he has learnt a lot over the centuries. With the help of various ancient vampires, he becomes determined to conquer the Voice and rescue the undead.
Lestat retains some of his original magnetism and the book’s most successful chapters are narrated by him, but even the brat prince’s superpowers cannot hinge its many plot strands and voices together. Vampires of all varieties and eras, scientists, hipsters, elders drift in and out of the action. The dead are risen, the powerful slain, the reader lost.
Rice’s style veers between chatty and extravagant. The occasional vamping reassures us that, unlike chaste promise-ring Twilight-teens, her vampires remain red blooded, but there is little to quicken the pulse. The Voice that plagues the vampires is neither charming nor compelling and it is hard to believe it could entrance anyone into committing genocide.
Interview with the Vampire is set in the 18th century, but its troubled, sexy vampires, “half in love with easeful death”, wholly in love-hate with each other, were so in tune with the 70s they almost seemed to anticipate the devastating arrival of HIV and Aids. Prince Lestat is firmly located in the 21st century, but its frequent references to contemporary technologies including cloning, offer no real insights into the modern world.
“The centre cannot hold,” Yeats wrote of another terrible coming. The description could be applied to Prince Lestat, a sprawling, meandering disappointment, overburdened by a cast of Busby Berkeley proportions. Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac deserve a place beside Lord Ruthven, Carmilla and Dracula in the history of vampire fiction. They are in danger, not from some mysterious telepathic force, but from their creator’s determination to keep on rolling them out. The dawn approaches and it is time to go to bed.
• Louise Welsh’s latest novel is A Lovely Way to Burn (John Murray).
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