Do we like Louis de Pointe du Lac?
A character from Interview with the Vampire (1976)
Our score: 5 out of 10. A conscience-ridden vampire we'd happily listen to and sympathise with, but he keeps feeding and keeps brooding instead of changing. We'd back him only from a safe distance.
Louis is a young man who runs indigo plantations near New Orleans in 1791. He is looking after his family and is lost in grief. A charismatic vampire, Lestat de Lioncourt, notices his despair and offers him an escape. The novel is Louis's confession, told centuries later to a reporter in a modern city.
Louis is the story's moral centre, in a world of predators. He is thoughtful, romantic and sensitive, and he can't stop questioning what he is. Unlike Lestat, who revels in being a vampire, Louis keeps looking for meaning and for a way to feed without losing his humanity. He is an easy narrator to feel for.
But sympathy isn't the same as backing him. He does a lot of wallowing, and his guilt rarely stops him from doing harm. He is passive when it matters and slow to take responsibility, and that is why he lands in the middle of the scale. He is a kind soul in a monstrous body who never quite earns the full benefit of the doubt.
His bond with Lestat, and the child vampire Claudia who joins their strange family, drives the book. The cost of that family on all three of them, and on Louis's own conscience, is where his moral failings show most clearly.