Hauls out all these fuckin books… anon why u kill me…
“He stared at the vampire’s full black hair, […] the curls that barely touched the edge of the white collar.” -Interview with the Vampire
“Those green eyes gazed at me […] with a mindless innocence,” -Interview with the Vampire
“I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner,” -The Vampire Lestat
“His blindness to the motives or the suffering of others was as much a part of his charm as his soft unkempt black hair or the eternally troubled expression in his green eyes.” -The Vampire Lestat
“Tall, slender figure. Short dark hair. […] Black hair, green eyes, […] a frayed black sweater that hung shapelessly from his shoulders, legs like long black spokes.” -The Vampire Lestat
“his black hair full and disheveled as it had always been in the old days, and his green eyes full of melancholy wonder,” -The Queen of the Damned
“I touched his face again, the cheekbones, the arch beneath the black eyebrow. What a finely made thing he was.” -The Queen of the Damned
“He ran his fingers back through his hair. Such fine black hair. The first thing I’d ever noticed about him–well, after his green eyes, that is–was his black hair. No, all that’s a lie. It was his expression; the passion and the innocence and the delicacy of conscience.” -The Queen of the Damned
“his face sharpening, the whole picture of high cheekbones and dark probing green eyes firing beautifully.” -The Queen of the Damned
“His face, quite thin and finely drawn by nature, an exquisitely delicate face for all its obvious strength,” -The Tale of the Body Thief
“I glared at him, at the sharp graceful angles of his imperturbable face, […] his wide-set eyes, with their fine rich black lashes. How perfect the tender indentation of his upper lip.” -The Tale of the Body Thief
“Louis de Pointe du Lac, […] slender, slightly less tall than Lestat […] black of hair, gaunt and white of skin, with
amazingly long and delicate fingers […]
whose
green eyes are soulful, the very mirror of patient misery, soft-voiced, very human,” -The Vampire Armand
“I followed his slim, delicate figure as it picked its way
through the clutter and nineteenth-century Paris, I knew that this black-clad darkhaired
gentleman, so lean, so finely sculpted, so sensitive in all his lineaments,” -The Vampire Armand
“it seemed to me that he was a vision of male perfection […] his curly black hair […] combed back over his ears and curling above his collar” -Merrick
“he seemed a young man of twenty-four–with sharply defined and beautiful features, and gaunt well-modeled cheeks.” -Merrick
That only took forever… even with all my dog-ears… anyways, Louis is a pale skinny dude with a Beauteous Male Model face, short, curly black hair, and green eyes, as described over and over and over and over again in almost every book. Brad Pitt was way off.
Also I think this accidentally became a testament to how fucking gay everyone is for Louis, it’s really unbelievable. I even tried to cut out most of the superfluous gay bits and still,
“And I realized what a dreadful
change had come over his narrow face” – Tale of the Body Thief
We’re all selective as to what canon we’re willing to accept anyway so even those who have read TOBT and/or MTD don’t necessarily accept one or both as canon. Some ppl insist that everything published is canon. But here’s the thing, there’s “the two crossover novels Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle, which Rice herself has now disavowed,” (X@sanguinivora) so like, even AR doesn’t demand that we accept everything as canon. At least that’s my own take on it.
TOBT: No spoilers. I don’t think Armand or Daniel are even mentioned in TOBT (I don’t have a copy nearby to check). But in their absence, it would appear that they were either A) unaware of what was happening w/ Lestat, or B) unwilling to help him. I don’t remember that ever being really developed, but Lestat does mention sometimes how it seemed like no one was WILLING to help, that they all were aware and left him to fend for himself.
HUGE SPOILER IN MTD under the cut, you have been warned.
MTD has alot of baggage bc there were those negative reviews that came out about it, and tbh I didn’t read them bc there was an avalanche of them, so I don’t know if any of them were fair or not, but I remember that AR made alot of fiery public response about it (to put it lightly) and was using her FB POTP army against any critical reviewers, it was a dark time, so that may have soured the fandom on that book a lot.
MTD was published in 1995 and it was supposed to be the LAST book in the series. 3 years later we got The Vampire Armand, because…………….
*****HUGE SPOILER*****
*****YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED*****
At the end of MTD, Armand believes that Lestat really went to Heaven and Hell when shown a particular piece of evidence, and Armand chooses to go out into the sunlight, and die:
“I will bear witness. I will stand here with my arms outstretched,” [Armand] cried, “and when
the sun rises, my death shall confirm the miracle.”
There is PLENTY wrong with TOBT. Plenty. So much so that there are many fandom ppl who don’t consider it canon.
I’ve seen attitudes about this book change over time. In ‘94, when that book was 2 yrs old, I remember ppl telling me they felt the series had ended with QOTD, bc TOBT was written off as simply being “the body-swap episode” (many films and TV series have tried their hand at that concept, and it’s usually a wacky ride). When Memnoch the Devil came out in ‘95, ppl didn’t like that one either, too offensive for its ideas about religion, and/or too preposterous of a plot; TOBT + MTD seemed to confirm that VC had jumped the shark, and a lot of ppl decided that the series ended at QOTD.
TOBT has wackiness in it, I mean, the difficulty of peeing (with a dick) is described in such vivid detail, there’s just too much comedy in it for me to discard it all outright.
(Oh! And perfect cinnamon roll Mojo the doge is in this book <3)
(Trying not to spoil it too much here but it’s pretty obvious what happens, but POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)
If TOBT was really just “the body-swap episode,” it could be written off as “wacky,” we could talk about the silliness of the details of the body swap, all that. We could even talk about how frustrating it was that Lestat went into a deal with a self-proclaimed THIEF and assumed that this dude would, you know, HONOR THE TERMS OF THEIR DEAL to the letter, but such were the poor state of the trust issues of our lovable but hamburger-brained moron de Lioncourt at that point in canon. He was also extra vulnerable to being taken advantage of bc he was feeling unworthy of life at all and pulled an Icarus ;A;
^So this was the cover for the edition that I read, it’s the first edition that was published. And the cover actually is relevant to this story, bc the statue you see here getting enveloped in a gray mist (it was a dull silver in real life) is The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna in Loggia dei Lanzi. I’m not going to go into a deep comparison of this to TOBT, essays can be and probably have been written on it.
I think a lot of those ppl in 1994 who wrote TOBT off as “wacky” had not actually read it bc this book takes the body horror to a place that most body-swap episodes/films wouldn’t dare to go. There are major consent issues, sexual and otherwise. There’s rape. I think AR was exploring sin and consent, she unflinchingly went there. Some ppl in the fandom refuse to accept it as canon bc they did read it and are repulsed by how far it went with these explorations.
Personally, I always advocate reading the book, and stopping if you need to, or engaging with it however works best for you. I think there are good things in that book and I think Lestat changes through the course of the story. Improvement is not always an easy trajectory. Just like in real life,
improving oneself can be a struggle, and there are often setbacks, sometimes devastating. One could say he ends up worse than he begins this story, one could say he ends up better than he begins. Just because you read/write problematic things, does not mean you condone them.
Oprah walked out of a screening of IWTV when it was first in theatres. [X] Tom Cruise told her afterwards that he wasn’t surprised. “The movie is not for everyone.” Similarly with fiction. This book is not for everyone.
[^X The pic I chose of the statue is not from the same angle as the pic used on the cover, but you get the idea.]
I-want-my-IWTV 