A ‘performative vampire’ Lestat

IMAGINE THAT AN ESTEEMED JOURNALIST published a book profiling a real-life vampire, and then that vampire’s twisted soulmate—also a vampire—started a rock band.

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If this were 1985, when Anne Rice’s novel The Vampire Lestat came out, you could expect such a revelation to upend human society. But in today’s U.S., an aspiring tech dystopia where the news can be weirder than the conspiracy theories? You'd get hours of social media chaos, days of cable-news hysteria, and then, most likely, everyone who didn’t already believe in lizard people would write off the author as a scammer and the rocker as a fraud. Or, as Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), now fronting glam-garage revival act the Vampire Lestat, tells it: Americans “lifted their heads from their algorithmic hand masters, uttered a collective ‘huh,’ and swiped left.”

This florid voice narrates The Vampire Lestat, airing Sundays on AMC, an alternately rollicking and gutting work of apocalyptic camp that creator Rolin Jones has suggested is, at once, the third season of his beloved Rice adaptation Interview With the Vampire and a new show with the same characters and personnel. In