There is a stretch of I-10 between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where the highway goes up on stilts and runs for miles over the swamp, and if you drive it at dusk in September, with the windows down and the cypress going black against an orange sky, you will understand everything about these books before you get to the city.

I'm Krista. I'm nineteen, a sophomore at a college in Baton Rouge, and I make that drive every chance I get, which is not as often as I'd like because I have a work-study job in the library and a car that overheats if you look at it wrong. I read Interview with the Vampire the summer I turned fourteen. A girl at the pool was reading it, and I asked her what it was about, and she said "New Orleans," and handed it to me. I finished it in two days under the covers with a flashlight, and nothing has been the same since.

Why I love them

The city. Anne Rice's New Orleans is the real one turned up a notch: the heat and the rot and the ironwork balconies, the cemeteries where the dead are kept above the ground in little white houses, the candlelight and the rain. I grew up two hours away, and I'd been to the Quarter a dozen times on school trips, and I never saw it until I read her.

The vampires have consciences. These are not monsters in capes. They're people who have been made into something terrible and can't stop asking whether they're damned, whether God exists, whether anything they do matters if they're going to live forever. When you're fourteen and you feel like nobody understands you, a vampire who has felt that way for two hundred years is excellent company.

The history. Each book drops you into another century, eighteenth century Paris, ancient Egypt, Renaissance Venice, and it's all so detailed you can smell it. I've learned more history from Anne Rice than from my survey course, and I'm not saying that to be cute. My professor would agree. He has a copy of The Vampire Lestat on his office shelf.

The writing. Long, rich, overgrown sentences, like a Garden District yard in August. Some people can't stand it. I could live in it.

The author

Anne Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941 and grew up in the Irish Channel, the old working neighborhood near the river, uptown. She spent many years in San Francisco with her husband, the poet and painter Stan Rice, and in 1988 they came home to New Orleans. She lives in the Garden District now, and if you've read the Mayfair books you'll recognize her house, which I will not be pointing out, because she deserves to be left alone in it.

In 1972 she lost her five-year-old daughter to leukemia. She wrote Interview with the Vampire soon after, and it came out in 1976. I don't think you can read about Claudia, the little girl who can never grow up, without thinking about that, and I'll leave it there.

The question: Lestat or Louis?

Every Anne Rice reader has to answer this eventually, usually at two in the morning in somebody's dorm room. Here's my answer, and how I got there.

My verdict, at nineteen: Lestat. I'm sorry, Louis. I still love you. I'll still cry at your chapters. But I'd rather spend eternity with the one who wants to go out dancing than the one who wants to sit in the dark and think about it. My roommate Jolene, who has read exactly one of these books, says this is the most I have ever talked about anything. She's probably right. My friend Sam is a Louis girl to her bones, and we have agreed never to discuss it while driving.

The movie (1994)

Interview with the Vampire came out in November 1994, directed by Neil Jordan, with a screenplay by Anne Rice herself. Tom Cruise as Lestat, Brad Pitt as Louis, Kirsten Dunst as Claudia, Antonio Banderas as Armand, and Christian Slater as the interviewer. Parts of it were filmed right here, in the Quarter and out at Oak Alley Plantation on the River Road, which plays Louis's plantation.

When they cast Tom Cruise, Anne Rice said publicly that he was wrong for Lestat, and plenty of us agreed with her. Then she saw the finished movie and said publicly that she'd been wrong. That impressed me more than almost anything else about the whole business: a famous writer, in front of everybody, changing her mind.

My opinion: Kirsten Dunst steals the movie. She was eleven or so when they made it and she plays a woman trapped in a child's body better than I could explain it in an essay. Cruise surprised me; he's better than he has any right to be. Brad Pitt looks miserable for two hours, which is correct, because Louis is. It loses a lot of the books' philosophy, and it couldn't fit everything, but it looks the way the book feels. B+. I've seen it nine times, four of them in the theater.