Stephen Thompson

Okay, so the Vampire Lestat comes on AMC on June 7th.

This is essentially the third season of the show, Interview with a Vampire on AMC, which is based on books by Anne Rice.

And the idea of the books and the show is that Louis...

is a very soulful, guilt-ridden vampire who goes public by revealing the existence of vampires like him to a journalist in an interview, hence the name.

The other main character in these books is Lestat, a very sexy vampire who sired Louis.

Those first two seasons on AMC were revelation because...

They used it as a jumping off point, the books.

They kept the essentials of the storytelling and the characterization, but they streamlined and interrogated and inflected and reimagined everything else.

The making Louis black, for example, opened the world up.

It added layers of meaning and nuance, which are not things anyone ever looks to those books for.

Jacob Anderson is Louis and Sam Reed as Lestat.

They make those characters unique.

You know, great and hella queer and hot as hell, both together and apart.

But, oh, man, am I worried now because now the show is pivoting to the story of the second book in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and changing the name of the show, as I mentioned, to The Vampire Lestat.

And when I read that book in college, I was done with this series because the prose is what it was.

It's largely Lestat's backstory as well.

But the parts set in the modern day in that novel, which was 1985 when the book came out,

are about Lestat deciding that he wants to become a rock star, a Satan inflected, hair metal adjacent rock star.

And let me just tell you, those parts of the book.

are hilarious.