I'm bloody excited that AMC is producing a Vampire Chronicles series by Anne Rice scheduled to air in 2022.

I found out this weekend that AMC is ordering an Interview with the Vampire show. Or, more appropriately, a "Vampire Chronicles" show made after the books: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned. I read these books many years ago, and I felt that the movie adaptations were actually quite terrible despite having cast the best looking men to be found in the world at the time to fill the titular roles of Armand, Louis, and Lestat. Also, Kirsten Dunst was good in the role of Claudia.

Interview, which was the book that started it all for Anne Rice, was lightning in a bottle. It is a legitimate classic of gothic/horror and dark fantasy. The other books serve to build on the mythology that she started with Interview, and I love that she traced the vampires, their power, and their lineage back to a primal source that had its beginnings in ancient Egypt (you see this in Lestat and in Queen of the Damned). A series is going to have a lot of time to explore this kind of mythology, and we will get to spend time with fascinating characters like Marius, who were crucial to the entire storyline but hardly touched upon at all within the context of the now old films.

I wouldn't want them to explore too much beyond Queen of the Damned. My reasons for this is that I think Rice ended up hitting the hard boundaries of her own imagination. Unlike a lot of modern fantasy and horror writers, she doesn't seem to have much of a capacity for synthesizing new concepts. For a long time, she was a genre unto herself. But now, fantasy and horror tropes are everywhere and the Vampire Chronicles are just one franchise among many.

Rice also had this thing about weird and uncomfortable types of love. Sometimes it seemed to work in the novels, but then there were obvious times when it just came across as creepy. I guess we shall see, because the first episodes are scheduled to appear in 2022. Anyway, color me bloody excited.

Is a vampire chronicles television show based on Anne Rice's books even a good idea?

It's possible that I have no limit for a vampire movie and/or television series. Upon learning that the Anne Rice Vampire chronicles are on their way to television via a pilot by Bryan Fuller, I got a little excited. The reason for this is that there was a time when Anne Rice was actually good. I started reading her work in high school. Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned were pretty amazing reads for me (at the time) and set my imagination afire. Before Rice, I hadn't really imagined that there could be something more to vampires than Dracula and Salem's lot. I never realized that they could be such "sexual" creatures. And yes, they were fresh monsters...not the stale "has-beens" that they've become today due to over-marketing and saturation of pop culture.

I was also an enormous fan of the mythology. I liked how Rice drew connections to a primal (and ancient) power that had its root in Egypt. The first time I met Akasha and Enkil in her books, and she described them as being carved from white alabaster, only alive, sitting in huge chairs, I was hooked. Then when Akasha drained Enkil to the point that it made him as transparent as glass, I just couldn't put the book down. It was kind of a "white walker" moment for me, and I just had to continue turning pages. I had to know more about these "gods," because there really wasn't any other word to describe them. They even had a kind of holy place/shrine that was really neat in its description. It's been ages since I've read these books, but I remember the pathways Rice described in the chamber that Lestat was sneaking around in.

I also appreciated the fact that Lestat was so homosexual. Anne Rice always treated us homo's with a nice touch, because she found the idea of gay sex to be quite arousing/erotic. Of course she always had the prettiest heroes. Lestat in the books (to hell with Tom Cruise) was a very attractive young man with blond hair and blue eyes...chosen by his vampire master because the golden hair would remind this boy of the sun and his blue eyes would echo the sky that he could never see again because he would be doomed to a land of night. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in my opinion were horribly miscast. As much as some people have said over the years that they liked the movie Interview With The Vampire, I really did not. I think I've seen it once and then caught snippets on t.v. here and there that I wasn't really that into and swiftly changed the channel. I do like the connections that I make with others though (who are fans of the books). My best friend Brad named a sourdough starter "Claudia." I smiled because I knew what it was a reference to almost immediately.

I pursued other Rice books of course, much to my chagrin. Tale of the Body Thief was terrible, and had such a different tone to it from the main vampire chronicles that I'd thought Anne Rice had lost her mind. But Memnoch the Devil killed any desire for me to pick up another Anne Rice book. Yes, it was just that awful and boring.

I feel a little sorry for Rice to be honest, and I think she's a decade or more too late. She had some super great ideas but got surpassed by so many other authors from Laurel K. Hamilton to the Sookie Stackhouse author to Twilight, that her story of "I want to shag a vampire; let me list the reasons..." is kind of lost on audiences at this point. Even though she was kind of the well-spring of all that, it's going to come across as cliche. And then there's shows that deal with vampires but are not vampire-based, which is probably how a series in the "Vampire Chronicles" is going to be. We've had Being Human, Midnight Texas, Preacher, Dracula, and the list goes on and on. There's dozens upon dozens of these kinds of knock-offs.

Hey...Fuller worked some magic with Hannibal (the television series), so maybe he can work some magic with Anne Rice's chronicles. I'll certainly be giving him the benefit of the doubt, but I won't be surprised if it fails.