Kong answer, short answer first and then I’m gonna, yep, for a long time. Short answer, Lestat and the devil. And I guess you could quibble with me about whether or not the devil of Western Christian mythology is omniscient, and you probably would be more right than I am because I’m a theater kid who went to law school. So tag Dan Mcclellan, the arbiter of all things niche theology. But yeah, Book 5 of Vampire Chronicles. I’m not the devil. Let’s start. Kills a mobster and befriends his televangelist daughter. And the devil offers him a sidegig and he steals this, like, relic, this veil with Christ’s face on it in blood. And he thinks he meets she.
It’s as is well known, Ann Rice struggled with her faith, both the faith of her upbringing, both leaving and returning to the church. And she explores that in The Vampire Chronicles because she, her, by her own admittance, said that she used Lestat and many of those characters to explore aspects of herself, including her sexuality and her theology, a totally valid practice as a writer and certainly something compelling in theory.
In practice, just for me, when The Vampire Chronicles becomes Christian fiction, I tend to check out. There’s something a little more nuanced though, cuz I think it’s worth discussing and it involves the dramaturgy of the book. And I’m not using that word like in a succession obnoxious way. I’m talking about like what makes it tick, like all of the little disparate parts that make things work. And a lot of it could be character motivation.
It’s a large question. It is. Why do characters talk to each other? Why is their dialogue, and that question is born of a premise, which is that there is a need to speak or a reason that is required. And if you do like experimental literature or experimental plays, sometimes you don’t need a reason. So let’s like, let’s understand that and then go with the premise of good, compelling or interesting dialogue tends to be motivated by a need to speak. And for humans, that could be a range of motivations. Like take any basic acting class. Do you need to argue? Do you need to defend yourself? Do you need to do X, y, and Z? Great.
Like we’re communicating cuz as humans, for the most part, an attempt to make clarity requires verbal dialogue. But we’re dealing with vampires here and part of the conceit of Van Rises vampires are that they are telepathic for the most part. They’re not between maker and fledgling. So like if I turn you into vampire, I can’t hear your thoughts. Things to think about if you ever wanna be a vampire, I guess. But a telepathy that can be so acute and so powerful that the concophony of global voices can drive you neck and futs like and Akasha. And when you pair that with the not aging, no diminishment in mental faculties and all of the vampires tending to have an affinity for some kind of acquisition or accumulation of knowledge. And you’ve got a recipe for a character with a really ridiculously high level of operational intelligence. If I can read your mind, let’s say I’m a 500 year old vampire, you’re a 2 thousand year old vampire. And in that moment, I can not only know but understand and download what you’re thinking, why you’re thinking it, what you’re feeling, and also if I feel like it, like route around in your memories and take your and now know what you knew 15 years before I was alive. Like not just from a textbook, but an embodied experience. It creates a kind of omniscience in the sense that you could logically predict the next actions of a character. So many times when Lestat is being spoken about, the characters sort of sigh because they know what he’s going to do. They might not know it for a certainty in the way that Paula trades, for example, can pinpoint with a series of logical deductions the next action someone will take and therefore gain a kind of omniscience, but rather that they’re bang on the money cuz they know him. That’s why I said near. Because there is a question of like future knowledge with the vampires that’s probably a little difficult to ascertain. But the result of all of this where you basically have characters at such a high intelligence level and they know them so well, is that you get conversations that can feel really pretentious and can really slow things down. And a good example of this in The Vampire Chronicles is David and Lestat talking about the relationship between god and the devil.
Now, a plot is not everything. And sometimes we don’t need a plot to always move the same way. I get that. But for me at least, it just, it was like, are we done with the Christian speculative fiction? But other times it can be used to create telenovela level drama between characters. What do you do when you’re with someone but you know them so well? If you’re in a couple’s spat or a dispute between friends and you have the ability to go to the jugular to like the heart of centuries old pain and use. It means you can be kind of an sob. If it’s that much harder for me to hurt you if I punch you in the face, I’m gonna use my powers to put you through the wall. And so we see characters in The Vampire Chronicles take these increasingly hard mental, emotional, physical hits, but it all stays believable because underneath of it, we understand they’re not quite human and they’re not really . And that’s another piece of what I think good genre fiction is, in particular SCI fi, horror and fantasy, is you don’t see a ton of .
Now, if it’s well written, you’ll follow the progression of characters and you will see them make decisions. Paging politesis like again. But we only understand that by virtue of the environment around them. Let’s start choosing to swap bodies was stupid. But we understood that. But the fact that he was able to do it in the first place speaks to a totally different level of intelligence. It’s compelling. It’s vexing. It’s probably not that big of a deal in the long run. But I think if you’re a writer or you just enjoy analyzing the fiction that you read, it’s something interesting to consider is how do you make characters that are all impossibly smart and immortal do stupid ? Because sometimes the best way to move a plot forward is somebody doing something dumb, in the case of The Vampire Chronicles, the conceit that Lestat is given is that Lestat loves Lestat. No one loves the sound of Lestott’s voice more than Lestat. Even when lestaltt despres, he has a schwa Devi that feels so contrasted with everybody else is wallowing in their immortal condition that you kind of can’t help but root for the guy. Something that’s probably helped by the fact that for the most part, Lestott’s narrating to us interview with the vampire as the first book is a break with that. But for the rest of The Vampire Chronicles, it’s mostly the style, and that’s the best example of a bias narrator that I can show you. And none of that is wrong. I don’t want you to listen to any of this. And I’m thinking I’m critiquing Ann Rice inherently. Actually, it makes for an interesting story. If you’re gonna build things, it’s important to consider how your characters might tell a story. Maybe as a writing exercise, if you’re writing in third person, think about what it would be to write a Lastad esque opening monologue for all of your characters. By doing so, by understanding how they would tell the story you’re trying to tell, you might get better insights into who they are and how they function. And you’ll have them work on a more sophisticated and engaging way.