Do we like Lestat de Lioncourt?
A character from Interview with the Vampire (1976)
Our score: 3 out of 10. Dazzling company at a party and a nightmare as a roommate. He's charming, loyal in his own way and openly cruel, so we'd enjoy him from a safe distance and not back him.
Anne Rice's first Vampire Chronicles novel is framed as an interview. Louis de Pointe du Lac, a vampire, tells a reporter the story of his life. Lestat is at the center of it: the vampire who found Louis grieving in 18th-century New Orleans, turned him, and mentored him. Lestat is a former French aristocrat with a showman's flair, a taste for fine things and a ruthless streak.
Lestat is vain, theatrical, funny and very good at making murder look like fun. He treats being a vampire as a gift to enjoy. Louis treats it as a curse to agonize over. Lestat has little patience for that, and he can be charming one minute and menacing the next. That gap drives the book, and it's why he's so entertaining and so hard to back.
We score him low because the book shows his wit, loyalty and wounded loneliness, but it also shows how he controls and manipulates the people he claims to love. He pulls others into his life for his own comfort, and the fallout is tragic. The story is told from Louis's side, so Lestat gets to be a villain here. Later books and adaptations (the 1994 film and the AMC series) tell more of his side and make him more sympathetic.
His 'family' with Louis and the child vampire Claudia falls apart. Lestat's manipulation leads them to turn on him, and the book's later events show that he is much harder to get rid of than they expected.