The Vampire Lestat
core novel 1985 The Vampire Chronicles
Record
| First published | 1985 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.11 (221,514 ratings, collected 2026-08-26) |
| Page count | 481 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780394534435 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
The Vampire Lestat shifts the series' perspective to Lestat de Lioncourt himself, who awakens from a long dormancy in the 1980s and decides, largely out of restlessness and a desire to reconnect with figures from his past, to become a rock star and expose vampires publicly to the modern world through his music. Framed as Lestat's own published autobiography, the novel traces his impoverished origins in eighteenth-century rural France, his transformation into a vampire by the ancient Magnus, and the complicated relationships that shaped his early undead life, including his devotion to his mother Gabrielle, his fraught friendship with the mortal Nicolas, and his encounters with the enigmatic elder vampire Marius, who holds knowledge of vampirism's deeper history.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Vampire Chronicles
- Series: The Vampire Chronicles core; position 2 of 13 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Anne Rice
Notes
- From the series record (The Vampire Chronicles): A continuous, decades-spanning narrative of vampire immortals told mostly through Louis and Lestat, running from the author's 1976 debut to her final volume in 2018; treated as complete following the author's death in December 2021.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Vampire Chronicles: position 2 of 13: previous Interview with the Vampire (1976) · next The Queen of the Damned (1988)
Sources
← The Vampire Chronicles dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.