Interview with the Vampire recap

In present-day San Francisco, a vampire named Louis tells his life story to a young reporter over one night. In eighteenth-century Louisiana, the grief-stricken plantation owner Louis is transformed into a vampire by the charismatic Lestat, who becomes his maker and companion. Tormented by his surviving conscience, Louis struggles against the killing his nature demands. To bind Louis to him, Lestat turns a small orphaned girl, Claudia, and the three live as an unnatural family for decades. But Claudia, her adult mind trapped forever in a child's body, comes to hate Lestat for condemning her to that fate, and she conspires with Louis to destroy him. Believing Lestat dead, she and Louis flee to Europe and, in Paris, find a coven of vampires led by the ancient Armand. There the coven learns of Claudia's attack on her maker and punishes her by exposing her to sunlight, killing her. Louis, shattered, destroys the coven in revenge and drifts through the following century emptied of feeling. Hearing the tragedy, the reporter recklessly begs to be made a vampire, and Louis, disgusted, refuses and leaves.

The novel opens in modern-day San Francisco, where a young reporter sits down to interview a man who calmly reveals himself to be a vampire. The vampire, Louis, agrees to tell his entire story, and the reporter begins recording. Louis carries the narrative back to late eighteenth-century Louisiana, where he lived as a wealthy young plantation owner sunk in grief and self-destruction after a personal loss, the state in which he first drew the attention of another vampire. This entry covers only the framing device and the premise, a vampire recounting his long life across the centuries to a spellbound human listener, before the events of that life unfold.

Louis and Claudia, believing they have destroyed Lestat, travel to Europe and find the vampire coven of the Theatre des Vampires in Paris, led by the ancient Armand, to whom Louis is powerfully drawn. But Lestat survived Claudia's attack and comes to the coven to accuse her. Because killing one's own maker is the coven's gravest crime, the vampires seize Claudia and the woman companion Louis had made to care for her, and shut them where the rising sun will reach them; Claudia is destroyed, found as ashes. Devastated by her loss, Louis takes his revenge by burning the theater and destroying the coven, sparing only Armand. The two travel together for years but the bond fades, and Louis returns at last to New Orleans, hollowed out and incapable of the passion and grief that once tormented him. In the framing present, having heard this tale of ruin and despair, the young reporter fails to grasp its horror and instead pleads to be given the dark gift himself. Louis, enraged that his listener learned nothing, refuses and vanishes into the night. Left alone, the reporter resolves instead to seek out Lestat.