Interview with the Vampire Audiobook (Free)

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its publication

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We are in a small room using the vampire, face to face, as he speaks–as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first 2 hundred years as one of the living dead .

He speaks quietly, plainly, even gently . . . carrying us back to the night time when he departed human life as heir–young, romantic, cultivated–to a great Louisiana plantation, and was inducted with the about Interview with the Vampire radiant and sinister Lestat in to the various other, the ‘limitless,’ life . . . learning initial to sustain himself for the blood of cocks and rats caught in the raffish streets of New Orleans, then on the blood of humans . . . towards the years when, leaving his final human ties under the tutelage of the hated yet necessary Lestat, he gradually embraces the behaviors, hungers, emotions of vampirism: the detachment, the solidified will, the ‘excellent’ sensual pleasures.

He carries us back to the crucial second in a dark New Orleans street when he finds the exquisite shed young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to ease and comfort her, struggling against the last residue of individual feeling within him . . .

We see how Claudia subsequently is made a vampire–all her enthusiasm and intelligence trapped forever in the torso of a small child–and how they reach their passionate and dangerous alliance, their French Quarter life of opulence: delicate Grecian statues, Chinese vases, crystal chandeliers, a butler, a maid, a stone nymph in the hidden garden court . . . night time curving into evening with their vampire senses heightened to the wonder of the world, thirsting for the wonder of death–a continuous stream of susceptible strangers awaiting them below . . .

We see them joined against the envious, harmful Lestat, getting into a perilous search across Europe for others like themselves, eager to discover the world they participate in, the means of survival, to know what they are and why, where they originated from, what their upcoming can be . . .

We follow them across Austria and Transylvania, encountering their kind in forms beyond their wildest imagining . . . to Paris, where footsteps in it, in exact rhythm with their own, steer these to the doors from the Théâtre des Vampires–the gorgeous, lewd, and febrile mime theater whose posters of penny-dreadful vampires at once mask and reveal the horror within . . . with their ending up in the eerily magnetic Armand, who brings them, at last, into intimacy with a complete excellent and decadent society of vampires, an intimacy that becomes sudden terror when they are compelled to confront what they possess feared and fled . . .

In its unceasing flow of spellbinding storytelling, of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, Interview using the Vampire bears witness of a literary imagination of the first order.