OH MY $DEITY I AM OBSESSED.

So, I’m a book fan–not a “True Fan,” as I read the first three and stopped–but I read and loved the first three books very much. (I recently read Tale of the Body Thief as well and enjoyed it!) But it’s as someone who read these books at an impressionable age that I come to the series.

Pros:

• There is no subtext, only text. BRING ON THE GAY!
• I love the changes to the time period and ethnicity of the vampires. As I said in my vampire post, BRING ON THE SYMPATHETIC BLACK VAMPIRES. There were racist cartoons in the post-Civil-War south depicting Black men as vampires, and I feel that the best way to defang (pun intended) that narrative is to make them the heroes.
• It has a very Anne Rice “feel.”

Cons:

• Basically, I don’t agree with some of the character choices. They gave a lot of Lestat’s character notes to Louis to make Lestat more antagonistic, for example. I mean. Lestat is the antagonist of Interview with the Vampire. Armand is the antagonist of The Vampire Lestat. And they’re doing a lot of “memory is a monster” unreliable narrator fun. But there are some Lestat would never moments.
• Sometimes I’m uncertain about internal consistency, but also “memory is a monster” and they are approaching Rashomon levels of different narratives here.

In short, I might set my alarm for 3am Sunday to watch the finale, and am waiting anxiously for season 3!

As you were.