SOURCE: “Vampires in the (Old) New World: Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles,” in Reading the Vampire, Routledge, 1994, pp. 108-23.

In the following essay, Gelder explores Rice's portrayal of vampire characters, family structures, and homoeroticism in Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, and The Tale of the Body Thief.

The ‘vampire chronicle’—where the life and fortunes of a vampire are mapped out through a number of novels—is a recent development in popular horror fiction. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Hotel Transylvania (1978) was the first of a sequence of novels about le Comte de Saint-Germain, an aristocratic (and, as it happens, ambidextrous) vampire who effortlessly glides through history. She has also written a trilogy about a female vampire, Olivia, Saint-Germain's one and only true love. Patricia Nead Elrod's ‘vampire files’ series, which began with Bloodlist (1990), traces the fortunes of a vampire detective, Jack Fleming, in...