The Extraordinary Fandom of 'The Vampire Lestat'

It’s easy to feel that you’ve arrived at The Vampire Lestat both a little early and a little late. Lestat is the third season of AMC’s TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series of novels, the first of which was famously the source text for the cult classic 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The novel tracks the on-again, off-again relationship between a flamboyant French vampire named Lestat and Louis, the man he turns into a vampire in late-eighteenth-century Louisiana. Transforming from mentor and mentee to frenemies to foes over the course of centuries, Lestat and Louis are an enigmatic couple. In adapting the book for TV, creator Rolin Jones remained largely faithful, with a couple of key exceptions: He converted Louis from a white slave owner to a Black brothel owner, and he made Louis and Lestat lovers.