Here’s a really shameful secret I have – while I spent a large portion of my youth reading awesome Aussie YA (Isobelle Carmody! Gillian Rubenstein! Victor Kelleher! John Marsden!) I also read a whole lot of really awful shit. Sweet Valley High and Babysitters Club books being the main culprits.
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There, I said it! (Oh, by the way, check out these amazing Chapters of BSC stories told in the style of Bret Easton Ellis over at Crushable, they are fucking hilarious!)
That all stopped when I read my first adult book in the first few days of the Christmas holidays after year six. I was twelve and a half and that book was Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice.
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I can’t tell you where I got the book – maybe my mum had it? Somehow it manoeuvred itself into my possession. That year we moved up north, and I can recall reading it in the car on the long drive there as I ate Twisties and battled carsickness.
It sounds really strange, but I these books had a pretty huge impact on my life. I like to joke that I hold certain things and people responsible for making me into the person I am today (Shirley Manson, Buffy, and grunge music are just some of the eclectic ingredients that combined to shape my particular personality and delicious psyche.) The Vampire Chronicles fit in that bizarre mix as well. I grew up devouring these books and it was these books that put me onto a more grown up fiction path.
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IWTV was so many amazing things to me. It was lush, romantic, violent, sexy, deep and trashy. It immersed me in that dark little world, the heat of New Orleans, the opulence of Paris. It was my jumping off point to a new world of reading. I didn’t read another BSC book after that. I needed more.
So when I was looking for something to read over my Christmas holiday, I found myself immersed again in The Vampire Chronicles.
Something compelled me to skip over the first in the series, so I instead started with The Vampire Lestat. I prefer this to the first novel – the history is more rich, with more fascinating characters. Then there’s Lestat himself – impetuous, impulsive, atheistic, aesthetic. Lestat does things because he wants to, just to see what might happen, and damn the consequences! I suppose I can relate to that – I have, at times behaved in a similar manner. I adore Gabrielle and her lonely strength. Marius and his tales of immorality gained from Druids in the great forests of Gaul still fascinated me. I loved the mystery of Those Who Must Be Kept, Akasha and Enkil in their endless, silent vigil.
Lets not speak of the films…
There were things I had forgotten – the intense verboseness of the prose. Rice can string a conversation about good and evil between Lestat, Gabrielle and Armand over innumerable pages and I was often impatient to get back to the storyline. At some stages I was this close to bellowing, “Stop all this blasted debate and get back to travelling the world and telling awesome ancient myths,” but I refrained, not wanting to startle the cat.
I’m about to move onto what was my favourite in the series, The Queen of the Damned, a book that sparked my interest in Ancient History and historical fiction. I’m really looking forward to it, it’s been a long, long time since I delved into those pages, but at the same time I’m worried – what if it isn’t as fun and immersive and sumptuous and shlocky as I remember?
Were you a teenaged Anne Rice fan too? Had a good or bad experience re-reading a book you once loved? What was the first adult book you ever read? Let me know below!
