yesterday, Oct 4, was seminal pop author and horror icon Anne Rice’s 78th birthday, and if you care about that here are some words about it:
I think the best thing about Lestat’s character over nearly fifty years of canon is that he is a completely evil, unforgivable bastard whose consistent singular redeeming trait which allows him to perform heroic acts is that he unconditionally loves everybody he has ever met. I think this is maybe the funniest and best character concept I can imagine- a totally evil person who loves everyone he has ever met- ESPECIALLY because he is also Rice’s self-insert character. what a conception of yourself to have! if Lestat is handed something good, he doesn’t know how NOT to fuck it up. he is a sadist and a murderer and more than that, he is just an ass; but he takes everybody in good faith, including people who are obviously trying to fuck him over. Rice said that when she wrote Memnoch the Devil, she kept trying to make it work with a mortal protagonist but couldn’t write a human person evil enough for the Devil to appear to him and ask for help- so she realized it HAD to be Lestat. he is that bad. but also, Lestat fucked that one up by taking THE DEVIL in good faith. what a combination of things to exist in one character! the thing about Rice is that when you wind up reading a lot about her, you can’t help but develop a sympathy even though she is somewhat unlikable in basically every traditional way because she and her protagonist share the same fundamental character trait: they keep fucking up, being stupid and venally bad, and keep getting up again. to be so hurt and angry all the time and incapable of not taking it out on people, and to also believe fundamentally that people are basically good, even the ones who hurt you. to leave the Catholic Church, and then re-join the Catholic Church, and then to leave it again! to be an ex-Catholic TWICE! to pledge that you will never write about vampires again because you are trying to be Good For God, and then publicly go back on it because you think there’s worth in writing about vampires! Lestat knows he is unforgivably bad, but he still wants to be good. he is the villain and the hero of his own story, like Anne Rice, like everyone. the crux of Lestat is that he’s a character about, what do you do when you know you are too terrible to be alive, when you are irredeemable, and unforgivable, and just have to keep living? what DO you do, when your very existence hurts other people, but you can’t give it up? you hurt, mostly. other people and also yourself. it took eleven books and forty years for Anne Rice to write some novels where Lestat does some heroic things and DOES NOT fuck it up, and it turns out its because his superpower is that he is empathetic towards every asshole because he, himself, has been every kind of asshole. Lestat sees someone who is an annoying evil pain in the ass and goes: Damn, that guy is probably hurting. this is also how Anne Rice feels about Lestat. if you are bad down to your bones and you know it, the only thing you CAN do is love the people around you and try to make them a little less lonely. Oh, Anne, O Lestat, Patron Saint of the Inimitable Fuckup- you just keep getting it all wrong and getting back up again. your stories say: There IS life after death, life after making the biggest mistake, life after being the Worst. but what DO you do? well, you try again. you fuck it up. you get up, again. and you do it again. and you fuck up again. get up again. you keep singing songs, even if they’re sad ones. otherwise, what’s the point? the sun will never rise, but you gotta keep singing to it.
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