Miriam McDonald
Anne Rice is one of the most important writers of vampire fiction. The impact her novel Interview with the Vampire had is indisputable. If the vampire of the ninetheenth century was the outsider threatening society and the vampire of much of the twentieth century the enemy within our own society (or a by-product of the flaws within our own society), Rice is the person most responsible for creating the image of the vampire you can sympathise with. Of course, she didn’t invent this – just look at J. Sheridan LeFanu’s short story "Carmilla" or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s St. Germain novels. But Rice’s novel gripped readers and exerted a phenomenal influence over vampire literature and film for the 1980s and 1990s.
Much of Rice’s other work never lived up to that first novel. Some of her subsequent novels have been good (The Vampire Lestat), some corny but fun (Queen of the Damned, Taltos) and a few of her most recent ones have been atrocious (Armand). Rice is not a really gifted writer. Take away the scene setting and rapturous descriptions and there’s often a pathetic little skeleton beneath – no real emotional depth or anything to make you think. Armand has a big heap of nauseating descriptive fluff on top and nothing at all beneath. Well, Merrick isn’t as bad as Armand. The story is set in New Orleans, and Anne Rice’s love for her hometown is clear in every scene set there. The settings feel real. Even better, there’s none of the rampant Catholic evangelism that ran through Armand. Sadly, those are the two good things about Merrick.
The focus of the story, Merrick, is a part African-American witch who worked under David Talbot when he was head of the Talamasca (a sort of secret society of paranormal investigators). David Talbot is now a vampire, having taken over a spare body at the end of Tale of the Body Thief, and the story is told from his point of view. His pal Louis wants Merrick to contact his dead vampire daughter Claudia. Like a sulky teenager, Lestat prefers to stay asleep in his room with music playing for most of the novel. And that’s the plot.
The rest of the book is taken up with flashbacks to David’s time with Merrick when he was alive, and Merrick’s life generally. The trouble with flashbacks is you know who lived and whether a plan succeeded before you read them. Flashbacks are action without tension. At the same time, lots of potential sub-plots and sinister figures are wasted. Even the spectral appearance of Merrick’s dead grandmother is a dead end. This wouldn’t matter if the characters were interesting and you could get emotionally involved in the story, but they are all phenomenally self-centred and narrow minded.
Louis is the only person in the story who tries anything remarkable – after getting in touch with Claudia and turning Merrick he attempts to kill himself. The others all stand around wondering whether it was their fault he did it, and how they would feel without him. Every vampire is the centre of his own little universe. The question on their lips is not "why?" but "was it because of me?". And you get the impression they would love the answer to be "yes, it’s all because of YOU". Still, they revive him and he decides he’s happy to be more like the others. You can almost hear him announce: "Hey guys, I really learned something today…" He should have died. It would at least have allowed him to be true to his pessimistic character in the other novels. In Interview With The Vampire his grief at losing Claudia and his failure to understand her rings true. Now he’s descended into bathos.
So, there they all are, self-pitying, self-centred vampires in their own little universe. Never growing old, never achieving anything, never creating anything of worth, never even dying, simply feeling tragic while living in great luxury. Their worthless existence goes on and on. Even their beauty is tedious. The vampires are all alike, with minor variations in gender and colouring. (If you don’t think you can have a minor variation in gender, read Merrick and change your mind.) If you’re an adolescent with a penchant for painting your nails black and whinging that no-one understands you, you’ll empathise with the characters and love this book. If you aren’t, you almost certainly won’t.
