Interview with the Vampire

God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness . . . Loneliness. Loneliness to the point of madness.

Finally finished with this! Sometimes I'm ashamed that certain books take me so long to read, but life gets in the way I guess. Anne Rice lost her daughter when she was about to turn 6. In this book, the vampire Claudia is turned when she is about 6, and most of the story revolves around her. Rice has said it was her unintentional way of coping, when she'd lost faith in the church and all. Reading Interview with the Vampire in this light is a dramatically different experience than if you read it without context, I assume. It makes everything so much more tragic, the gentle feeling of loss that flows through every page, whether it's Louis's loss of his own human life or the connections he'd made with other vampires, etc. Claudia is the crux of it all, and it's heartbreaking.
I enjoyed the book a lot more towards the end, the middle was a little slow! Really it's a 3.5 star but half-stars don't exist here, so, 3.