The archetypal vampire myth is refreshed for a modern audience in this narrative of an 18th-century Louisiana plantation owner named Louis Pointe du Lac and the charismatic and powerful vampire Lestat who chooses Louis to be his fledgling. In Louis's first-person confession to a skeptical boy, this novel transforms the vampire from a hideous predator into a highly sympathetic, seductive, and human figure. The life of immortal Lestat, raised with a deep Catholic faith, provides a background for the novel's philosophical discussions of the nature of evil, the reality of death, and the limits of human perception.