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The Vampire Lestat
Born into Darkness: 1780
Place of Birth: Auvergne, France
Place of Making: Paris, France
Paramours: Gabrielle, Louis, Armand, Marius, David, Akasha, Claudia, Nicolas, Quinn
Fledglings: Gabrielle, Louis, Claudia, Nicolas, Mona, David
Maker: Magnus
Screen Name: Available
Journal Link: Available
Optional PBs: Heath Ledger, Leonardo DiCaprio, Chad Michael Murray
 The Vampire who made Louis into a vampire and therefore was responsible for the telling of The Vampire Chronicles. He is the narrator of Vampire Lestat, Queen of the Damned, Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil, but makes his entrance in Interview with the Vampire.
When Louis becomes a vampire in Interview with the Vampire, he claims that a blonde, blue-eyed, angel-faced vampire who quoted Shakespeare - Lestat - seduced him. However, Lestat loses this air of innocence and enchantment when Louis notes that Lestat seemed quite nonchalant, even wasteful, about the act of killing. Louis goes on to present Lestat as a thoughtless, vulgar, self-centred being who covets Louis's plantation and who wines whenever things fail to go his way. Lestat even makes a child vampire, Claudia, whom he intends to use to control Louis (although in Body Thief, Lestat almost redeems himself by confessing that his motives for that act were to acquire a friend, pupil, muse, and daughter). Louis and Claudia eventually attempt to rid themselves of their maker by cutting him to pieces and tossing him into a swamp, but Lestat survives and returns for revenge. They manage to escape Lestat's clutches when he is trapped in a burning town house.
In the first draft of Interview with the Vampire, Lestat's involvement with Louis ends here. Louis leaves him in the burning town house, concluding that what he left behind was not really Lestat but an animated corpse much like the creatures he later sees in Eastern Europe. To his mind, Lestat is dead. Another dimension of Lestat added in this early version is that Lestat had been a poet as a boy; it was his poetry, full of dreams and longings, that endeared Louis to him. When Louis tries to get Lestat to talk about his poetry, Lestat curtly dismisses it, as if he views it as merely an idealistic boy's worthless fancies.
In the published version of Interview with the Vampire, Lestat re-enters the lives of Louis and Claudia in Paris, where he incites the coven at the Theatre of the Vampires to destroy Claudia. (In Vampire Lestat, Lestat claims to have only been guilty of not defending her.) Louis does not mention Lestat again until he encounters him years later in New Orleans, when Lestat is too weak to kill for himself and seems to be slowly dying from his inability to adapt to change. Despite Lestat's pleas for Louis to remain there with him, Louis leaves and is not really sure what happened to Lestat.
However, Lestat was never laid to rest in Rice's mind. Following the publication of Interview with the Vampire and across the years, Lestat began to take full shape as a character. "Lestat formed in the corner of my eye as I was writing Interview," Rice explains, "and then he took on great strength. He developed this amazing coherence." Rice wrote six other novels before she returned to the vampire novels; two of them, Exit to Eden and Beauty's Release, helped her to find Lestat's voice. "When I went back to the vampire Lestat, I was loosened up by that writing to make Lestat the infinite, warm-blooded man. As a writer I put myself into Lestat much more deeply that I had put myself into Louis because I was dealing with aggression in Lestat, and dealing with my own repression's. Lestat was my male hero who could do what I couldn't. I wanted to get out of the mind-set of the passive grieving person [which Rice was feeling while writing IV, due to the loss of her daughter]. Lestat really became part of me." In fact, Lestat became the male that Rice herself secretly wanted to be.
VL picks up after the publication of Interview with the Vampire, Lesat had weakened to the point of going into the ground in a trance like state from 1929 until 1984, barely aware of the changing world, he is awakened by the sound of rock music being played down the street. He rises and feeds on animals until he is ready to face the world again. He visits the rock group down the street, they hand him a paperback copy of Interview with the Vampire, and Lestat reads it and decides to write his own story. In Lestat's mind, Louis, whom Lesat describes as the "sum of his flaws," has misperceived their whole relationship because of his dependent, resentful perspective. Lestat wants to set the record straight, and he begins his story by showing how he jumps right into things.
"Lestat is the man of action," says Rice, "the person who cannot be paralysed with guilt the way Louis was. It fascinated me to do a portrait of a different kind of personality, of someone who had never had a teacher [a mentor who could teach him how to be a vampire] and who had never really bemoaned the lack of one. I wanted to get into the head and heart of someone who would not give up, no matter what."
In Vampire Lestat, Lestat tells about his life as a mortal in France, where he was the seventh son of an indignant marquis, and one of only three sons who survived. His character is formed from the conflicting demands of being aristocratic but poor. At the age of twelve, he decides he wants to pursue life in a monastery because he loves the rituals, orderliness, and sense of being good. His father forbids it and takes Lestat's books away. Lestat later attempts to run away with a wandering theatre group, but is once again thwarted.
Responsive to change and resistant to monotony, Lestat goes out to hunt a pack of wolves and nearly dies trying to fight off these eight hunger-maddened animals. As a result of his bravery, Nicolas, the son of a local merchant, befriends him. Together, Lestat and Nicolas go to Paris, where they eventually become part of a theatre group. There, a vampire, Magnus, targets Lestat to become his heir. Lestat resists but is overpowered. The same night Lestat becomes a vampire, Magnus destroys himself, leaving Lestat to learn all by himself what it means to be a vampire. Lestat's sense of adventure and curiosity propels him into his new form of existence. He is twenty years old. (Lestat gives his age as twenty-one when he fought the wolves, so this is a contradiction in the text.)
Eventually Lestat makes his dying mother, Gabrielle, a vampire, along with Nicolas. In the process he encounters Armand and his coven, which then strive to bring Lestat's new existence to an end. They have existed for centuries according to a system of rules and rituals, and Lestat's "unvampirelike" behaviour, according to their ideas, threatens their manner of existence. Much to Armand's grief, Lestat instead empowers the coven to break free of their long tradition of religious superstition. Armand then wants to join with Lestat and Gabrielle, telling them his story in an attempt to gain their sympathy, but they leave him behind in Paris. Lestat decides to seek out Armand's maker, Marius, in a quest to find a deeper understanding of what it means to be a vampire.
The search takes ten years, and Lestat eventually despairs of achieving any success, going into the ground to experience "the first death." Marius then arrives and resuscitates him, taking him to an island where he tells Lestat the tale of the origins of the vampire race and shows him the vampire Father and Mother, Enkil and Akasha. Lestat brashly wakes the Mother, Akasha, and drinks of her blood until Enkil tears him away from her: nevertheless, this brief nourishment empowers Lestat to sustain a near-fatal attack years later from his fledgelings, Louis and Claudia. Marius sends Lestat away for his own good, and Lestat arrives in New Orleans to be with his aging mortal father.
When Lestat encounters Louis there, he senses in him an echo of Nicolas; an intense, self-destructive, and cynical nature, one filled with despair. Louis's beauty, refinement, and "staggering dependence" seduce Lestat, and he makes Louis into a vampire. Louis's anger and resentment strain their relationship until Lestat makes Claudia, both to see what would happen when the Dark Gift was given to a child and to keep Louis with him. He also performs the act in an attempt to feel like God, for he is creating another being in his own image. He enjoys the little "family" he had created, but Louis and Claudia view him with fear and mistrust. After an uneasy bond that lasts sixty-five years, Lestat's two fledglings decide to seek their freedom and rise up against him.
After the attack, Lestat is considerably weakened and his injuries only increase when he seeks out Armand to help him. Nursing nearly a century's worth of bitterness for having his life (ie: his coven) dismantled and for having been rejected, Armand pushes Lestat off a tower. He also uses Lestat to help destroy Claudia so that Armand can have Louis for himself. Lestat finally takes refuge in a house in New Orleans, where he lives off the blood of animals. (Lestat claims here that the scene Louis describes in IV, of him grovelling and pleading with Louis not to leave him, never took place; and both go on to allude to this fabrication in Body Thief.) In 1929, Lestat goes into the ground for the second time to allow his battered body to heal.
Lestat lives according to his own whim and in brash defiance of social propriety and rules of conduct. "My strength, my will, my refusal to give up," he claims, "those are the only components of my heart and soul which I can truly identify." Yes, Lestat courts disaster and tragedy, such as the time he decides to fly straight into the sun, but he also gains rewards from his excesses and the risks he takes. For example, although he is told not to reveal what he knows of other vampires, he deliberately tells all about his race in his autobiography. "I want to affect things," he exclaims, "to make something happen!" The vampire establishment does rise against him, but Akasha chooses to favour him and protect him.
As a vampire, Lestat wants to use his evil image to do good. His goal is eventually to redeem himself, and so he chooses to feed on those mortals who commit the most evil against their own kind: serial killers. "Lestat," says Rice, "is the bloodthirsty, wolf-killing, violent person who aspires to be something infinitely good and can't be." Lestat also becomes a rock star, partly because he wants to spread vampire lore through his songs in order to inspire mortals to eradicate vampires, and partly because he loves to play to an audience: "I could feel the attention as if it were an embrace." He equates actors and musicians with saints, so the medium of rock music seems to him to be the perfect way to do good with his evil nature.
Yet his music brings the Mother, Akasha, out into the open, and she abducts him to make him her partner in killing off most of the world's population of men so that she can reign over women as the vampire goddess. Lestat resists, but in the process becomes more aware of what his is: a vampire. Akasha teaches him the true strength of his powers and he moves toward the more godlike aspects of being a vampire. He can fly through the air, move or burn things telepathically, survive the sun, and exercise other vampiric powers to their greatest degree. Although he craves blood more than ever, he discovers he is actually free of requiring blood for his survival.
On the heels of his experience with Akasha, Lestat befriends the mortal David Talbot of the Talamasca. He lures David towards vampirism even as he is lured towards becoming human. Lestat's two firm beliefs - both of which are proven to be illusions in BT - are that no mortal can refuse the Dark Gift (but David does) and that vampires want to be mortal again. Lestat meets Raglan James, who offers to temporarily switch bodies with him so that Lestat can experience once more what it is like to be human. Lestat agrees but upon making the switch and becoming mortal soon realises he prefers being a vampire. Raglan James, however, has other ideas; he has taken Lestat's body permanently, which requires Lestat to forcibly steal his body back. This adventure dispels all of Lestat's illusions about being redeemed. Of his own free will, he has chosen to be reborn to darkness and he also furthers his notion of himself as an evil creature by forcing David into accepting the Dark Gift.
Lestat dictates his next book, Memnoch the Devil, to David Talbot, who records it for him. He begins with an episode of being stalked while he himself is stalking a notorious killer named Roger. Sensing something different about his stalker, Lestat believes the Devil is after his soul. He discusses the possibility with David, who wonders whether there is some connection between Lestat's targeted victim and this creature that so frightens him. Lestat is unsure, so he kills Roger to find out. To his astonishment, Roger then appears to him as a ghost.
Roger tells Lestat the story of how he acquired wealth via criminal activities and how he used it to collect valuable religious artefacts from around the world. He wants to give something to his daughter, Dora, a televangelist, to help ground her religion on something solid and miraculous. Among his possessions are twelve books by a mystic named Wynken de Wilde, who had devised a spiritual path that involved great sensuality. Roger wants Lestat to keep these books safe and also to appear to Dora as proof of the supernatural. Lestat is unsure about the latter, but he agrees to do what he can for Dora.
He meets Dora in New Orleans at her home, St. Elizabeth's, a former orphanage. Although she realises he is not human, she shows no fear. He tells her he wants to help her, but the presence of his stalker, whom he now knows is most definitely interested in his soul, causes him to flee.
The stalker turns out to be the Devil, although he calls himself Memnoch. He tells Lestat that he is not evil and that, in fact, he desires to reverse the tide of evil in the world. For that , he needs help from someone as strong as Lestat. He invites Lestat to come with him to meet God an to see Heaven and Hell. Afterwards, he can make his decision whether or not to become the Devil's lieutenant.
Lestat consults with Armand, David and Dora. Although Armand is suspicious and David reserved, Dora approves, so Lestat goes off with Memnoch to Heaven. He is amazed by what he sees there and completely overcome with a sense of beauty, joy and supreme satisfaction. He meets God, who insists that Lestat would never be His adversary. These words frighten Lestat, but Memnoch insists that he listen to the whole story of creation.
Memnoch tells Lestat about the nature of the angels and the stages of creation. The key point he wants to emphasise is that by making destruction, death and suffering part of the energy exchange of nature, God Himself included evil in His plan. Human beings, God insisted, are part of nature and thus part of the cycle. Memnoch claims to disagree with this, believing that the human spirit places humans somewhere between nature an divinity. He pleads with God to allow the souls of deceased humans into Heaven, but God allows only those He feels are worthy. At Memnoch's urging, however, God temporarily became a man to experience for Himself a human's perspective. Contrary to Memnoch's wishes he offered Himself as a sacrifice for the purpose of redeeming more souls. Memnoch thinks this scheme only resulted in more tyranny, suffering and evil amongst humans.
God invites Lestat to witness His passion. Lestat lines up with the crowd, who watch Christ carry the cross to His execution. He sees Veronica offer her veil and watches as Christ's face miraculously imprints itself on the material. Christ invites Lestat to drink his blood. As Lestat does so, he experiences a powerful sense of light and divinity, followed by an excruciating feeling of separation. For safekeeping, Christ then gives him the veil. Lestat flees with it, but Memnoch takes him on a journey straight into the bloody history of Christianity. Lestat keeps the veil out of harm's way, particularly during the Fourth Crusade.
For Lestat's benefit, Memnoch replicates the discussion he had with God over the Devil's function on Earth in which it was decided that Memnoch's activities would contribute to purifying and illuminating souls in preparation for redemption. Memnoch then takes Lestat to Hell to show him where souls are purged; however, they suffer extreme torment in the process. When Lestat sees how these souls are plagued by their victims, he realises his own victims are awaiting him. Fleeing from Hell, he refuses to serve either God or the Devil. Memnoch tries to grab him and hold him fast, but instead ends up ripping out his left eye. Lestat escapes to Manhattan, where he had left Dora, feeling that none of them will ever be truly safe again. To gain sustenance without harming her, Lestat drinks from he menstrual blood, linking her to Veronica, the woman whom Christ had healed of a chronic flow of blood. Lestat vows never to take another human victim.
David and Armand are with Dora, so Lestat tells them all at once what he has been through. He shows them the veil. Against Lestat's wishes, Dora takes it and displays it to the public as a miracle of Christianity. The media creates an event of it and people flock to Manhattan. To Lestat's horror, Armand destroys himself in the sun to affirm the veil's authenticity and the truth of God's existence, and other vampires soon follow suit. Lestat realises that he has inadvertently given new life to a destructive religion. The spectacle drives him back to New Orleans; Dora has given him St. Elizabeth's and all of Roger's relics, so he goes there. Louis is waiting for him there, and Maharet arrives with a message from Memnoch.
She gives Lestat back his eye, then binds him in chains as she tells him what Memnoch has to say. Memnoch congratulates Lestat on a job well done. Shocked and outraged, Lestat cannot bear to believe that he might have been a pawn in the Devil's game. When Maharet deems it safe, she unchains him and leaves. Lestat wanders the city, unable to feel any sense of certainty or security. What he had witnessed may have been the ultimate truth, a pack of lies and hallucinations, or part truth, part fiction. He does not know the meaning of his story, but he believes it happened just as he told it: "This is all I know." He ends the book by saying that he will pass now from fiction to legend.
Upon finishing the novel, Rice felt that Lestat had indeed walked out of her life "and into any legend that luck would allow. As I completed the last page, I knew Lestat was leaving. We both knew that what we had done together in the five books was finished."
Given the opportunity, Lestat is the vampire Rice would be: "He is my hero." She views him as a side of herself that she has not developed, cherishing his "strength, penchant for action, lack of regret, lack of paralysis, ability to win over and over again, and his refusal to lose." Although she thought that Memnoch the Devil might be her last novel with Lestat, he remains an insistent voice for her and may yet show up again.
-- Bio courtesy of Katherine Ramsland
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A black-haired Italian vampire, he is the leader of the satanic coven in Rome when Marius lived in Venice. He was born to Darkness in the mid-1300's during the reign of the Black Death, and his vision for vampires is that they be a "vexation without explanation", which causes mortals to doubt God. Santino helps to form the Great Laws and see that they are carried out. He leads the attack on what they view as the heretic Marius, whom they are trying to destroy because he lives among mortals. Although the attack fails, it drives Marius from Venice and results in Armand's apprenticeship into the coven. Later Armand hears that Santino went mad and abandoned the coven, which subsequently dissolved in chaos. And when Lestat and Gabrielle meet the members of another Roman coven, there is no evidence of Santino.![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
In Greek mythology, Vulcan fashioned Pandora, the "all-giver," from clay in the image of Aphrodite, although ostensibly each of the gods and goddesses participated in her creation. Zeus offered her as a gift to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. Having stolen fire from the gods to give to humankind, Prometheus knew the gods were angered at him and warned his brother not to accept the gift; Epimetheus took Pandora anyway. Jupiter gave Pandora a sealed earthenware jar to take with her and endowed her with an insatiable curiosity. He then instructed her never to open the container, but, of course, she did, thereby letting out all manner of diseases and evil and bringing the Golden Age to an end. She closed the jar just in time to seal Hope inside. From then on, sickness and death separated humans from the gods, and humanity's only salvation was hope. 
A vampire who represents the figure of the wise teacher. 
One of the red-haired twins, she is one of the First Brood of vampires and makes her first appearance in the Chronicles as Jesse's "aunt." In fact, throughout Jesse's family lineage there has always been a woman named Maharet, who pretended through the centuries to be many different women to disguise her vampirism. Maharet invites Jesse to her home in California, the Sonoma compound, and there shows her the interconnections of the Great Family.
A tall, blond blue-eyed Druid priest with a hawk nose who teaches Marius the customs, laws, and poetry of the Druids so that he can become an appropriate god for them. Mael also explains to Marius what will happen to him when he is transformed into a vampire. After Marius flees the Druids, Mael drinks from a vampire himself and goes through the transformation. He soon loses his belief in his Druidic religion and becomes one of the wandering rogue vampires.
The first vampire to tell his story to a mortal. The protagonist of Interview with the Vampire, Louis describes to a young reporter what it has been and is like to be a vampire. After nearly two centuries, he is weary of his existence. Rice originally intended his tone to sound like that of Oscar Wilde. "He was supposed to be a sort of Geoge Sanders type of character, world-weary and comical." However, Louis's voice changed when Rice transferred her perspective from that of being the reporter to seeing the experience through the eyes of Louis himself.
One of the First Brood, he is the third vampire in existence. In mortal life, he is the steward for King Enkil and Queen Akasha. When the royal couple want to prove the spiritual impotence of the red-haired twins, they order Khayman to rape the two women. He reluctantly obeys, inadvertently fathering a child with Maharet. As a result of this act, the spirit Amel torments Khayman until Akasha and Enkil step in to try to persuade the spirit to serve them. 
Maharet's mortal descendant, who plays a significant part in Queen of the Damned.
Lestat's mortal mother and first vampire companion. She is named for an archangel and a messenger of God, who announced the birth of Christ and will also announce the Day of Judgement. 
Superior General of the Talamasca, he is a cultured British gentleman with dark grey hair and black eyes who possesses a powerful ability to conceal his mind from others. 
The reporter from a San Francisco radio station who records Louis's confession about being a vampire and publishes it under the pseudonym Anne Rice, as Interview with the Vampire. Tall and slender, with violet eyes and a beautiful face, Daniel is about twenty (or twenty-two) years old when he meets Louis, for he is thirty-two at the time of Lestat's rock concert. (There is some discrepancy in the text concerning Daniel's age. He may have been thirty or thirty-two.)
The five year old child made into a vampire in 1794. (In the first draft of Interview with the Vampire, Rice described Claudia as three or four years old.) Louis first comes across the blonde, blue-eyed child as he roams New Orleans asking himself whether he is damned. Since he wants to die, he has denied himself the sustenance of blood: when he sees the child crying beside the corpse of her plague-infested mother, Louis feels so trapped in his self-condemnation that he drinks from this child, who is his very first human victim in four years. When Lestat sees what Louis has done, he ridicules him.
An auburn haired, adolescent vampire made in the fifteenth century at the age of seventeen by Marius. He is a principal character in Interview with the Vampire and Vampire Lestat, with a lesser part in Queen of the Damned. Originally, he had been intended as a central factor in the plot of Queen of the Damned, but Rice found that after developing him further, he was not evil enough.