Today is Anne Rice’s birthday. She would have been 84.

I first read Interview with a Vampire right after I’d graduated from high school. Most of my friends were on a mission trip to Guatemala and I, for reasons I cannot recall, stayed home. Tasha loaned me her copy to read while they were gone.

I devoured it. And then I started looking for what I considered the source material. I read Stoker’s Dracula, I read Carmilla, I tried to read The Vampyre but by that point, I think my head was too full of the lore and I moved on to the other Anne Rice books, the other vampires, and then the Mayfair Witches. I wore a lot of black.

Memnoch the Devil was released when I was on the road with the ministry team. I bought it on one of our days off and hid it in my suitcase so as not to offend a host family along the way. I read it in the van as we went from place to place and I remember thinking it was incredibly blasphemous, though I could not for the life of me tell you a bit about it now. Might be time for a reread.

I reread Interview a few years back when I was prepping for a trip to New Orleans. It still holds up. But Anne was right, Rutger Hauer should have been Lestat on film.