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IN THE VAST, DARK LANDSCAPE OF GOTHIC FICTION IN LATE TWENTIETH-century America, the seminal figure of the vampire wanders in ever-increasing numbers. Much as the Gothic has seen a flowering in the past twenty-five years, the vampire has risen from the uneasy sleep of the earlier part of the century and experienced his own dark renaissance. Prior to 1976, in film and fiction, the vampire was portrayed in the mold into which he had been cast by Bram Stoker in the greatest of the nineteenth-century vampire novels, Dracula-an essentially solitary predator whose presence was the stimulus for an intrepid group of vampire hunters to form and bay in his pursuit, and whose time on center stage was limited to brief, menacing appearances and capped with a spectacular death scene. The vampire was, to borrow a term from film, a McGuffin-a device to drive the plot and give the vampire hunters something to pursue.
In 1976, this changed. Several years earlier, the mainstream Gothic had been brought to renewed attention by the success of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist in both its print and film versions. A young novelist named Stephen King was finding a broader audience, and in 1975 had published a "traditional" vampire novel, 'Sa/em'.f J.ot. Then, in 1976, Anne Rice published her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, and turned the vampire paradigm on its head. This breakthrough novel focused not on vampire hunters, but on the vampires themselves-and what a different breed they were.
Louis, Lestat, and Claudia slept in coffins and drank blood, but throughout Interview with the Vampire, they preyed with impunity, they gave themselves over to introspection, and they sought and found an entire subculture based on their own peculiar existence. They existed in a different world, and the old models no longer applied. Although, given their great debt to the brooding Byronic heroes of British Romanticism, they may not have been the first sympathetic vampires, they were the first successful ones in their initial publication, and they have been followed by a host of others.
After Rice, and even in her subsequent novels in the "Vampire Chronicles" series, the vampire was used to provide a vehicle for social commentary, and vampirism itself became a convincing metaphor for such...