Anne Rice
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angst in regard to his dead brother to a local priest. This supposedly devout manof-the-cloth proclaims that, “‘as for this brother of yours, he was possessed of
the devil.. . The devil made the visions . . . The devil was rampant. . . Nothing
would have saved my brother but exorcism, prayer, and fasting, men to hold him
down while the devil raged in his body and tried to throw him about”’ (12). But
an angry and nearly irrational Louis cannot accept such a paltry explanation of
his brother’s mindset and behavior, and almost kills the priest for daring to make
an assessment of this nature.
Thus Rice presents us, in the very first of The Vampire Chronicles, with a
clash between the secular and the religious worlds. Louis, of course, belongs to
the former, his brother to the latter. At a fairly young age, in fact, Louis’s
brother removed himself as far as possible from the quotidian in order to pray to
God in Heaven constantly, and to contemplate incessantly the deeds of those
elevated to sainthood. Louis, on the other hand, did little more than sit through
mass every Sunday without any real belief in God, or Christ, or the saints,
despite his words to the contrary. Indeed, he himself tells us, ‘“ I saw my life as
if I stood apart from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the constant fleeing from one
petty annoyance after another, the lip service to God and the Virgin and a host of
saints whose names filled my prayer books, none of whom made the slightest
difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence’” (14). If he had been
a true believer in all of the myriad tenets of Catholic Christianity, he could
have—should have, in fact —unquestioningly accepted the idea of his brother
having visions of spiritual greatness as well as the related notion of his being
one of God’s elect on Earth. But, instead, and because of what he deems his
arrogance and condescension, his brother had died. Meanwhile, his rage at the
priest for claiming that his brother had been ensnared by the Devil stems from
the fact that, while he may not demand the same of himself, he expects a
clergyman to recognize the possibility of saintliness in a mortal rather than to
dismiss it as no more than demonic possession. Given the specificity of these
circumstances, it proves a small wonder that Louis seeks to annihilate himself.
Rice describes him as a vampire roaming “in a world without God” and
searching “for a meaningful context in vain” (138). That he finds, rather, a
horrific and penitential immortality as a vampire forms the grand and Romantic
irony of his abject quest.
The title character of The Vampire Lestat, the second volume of The
Vampire Chronicles, explains at the outset of “his” novel that the 20th century
“had inherited the earth in every sense” and, in doing so, “no small part of this
unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people in the very midst
of their freedom and wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he had been in
the 1700s. And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place o f the
olcT (9). The unmistakable echo of Nietzsche aside, Lestat’s observations and
statements here form a thematic motif that threads its way throughout his
exciting and intricate narrative. As Lestat proceeds to relate the story of his life,
which takes us some 200 years back in time from the late 20th century, we learn