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katiekate97 wants to read Interview with the Vampire October 23, 2023 ☆☆☆☆☆ |
Straight onto the tbr because I've been ride or die for Daniel Molloy ever since my baby undergrad wannabe-journalist self first read Under the Burning Sky. (But I think some marketer made a copy-and-paste mistake somewhere though, because the blurb right now is for some romantasy crap. Knowing the kind of stuff Molloy's written in the past, I'm betting a nickel that the title means this is actually about Big Pharma and he's doing some big Theranos-style exposé, something like that.)
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wuthering_willa reviewed Interview with the Vampire March 17, 2024 ★★★★★ |
Amazed that I haven't seen anyone really talking about this book because it is truly unhinged in the best way. Divorced gay vampire dads have mopey undernegotiated sex in Architectural Digest-worthy settings and also get thrown into and off of shit?? I stayed up until 5am reading this and then had to go work the opening shift and I regret nothing. Would read again, will read again.
Trust me, if you're a Little Life girlie, or if you've ever hate-read some CoHo and said "but what if this book was written by someone gay and slutty?", you will gag over this.
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linoulala reviewed Interview with the Vampire March 25, 2024 ★★★☆☆ |
Je l'ai écouté en livre audio. Bon, un peu prévisible. Le narrateur était excellent (sauf quand il fait un « accent français » . Bof.).
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heyheyitsalexx reviewed Interview with the Vampire March 28, 2024 ★★☆☆☆ |
I'm not mad at this one, I just don't... understand it.
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katiekate97 reviewed Interview with the Vampire April 1, 2024 ★☆☆☆☆ |
This was not about Theranos.
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jon_goddard24 reviewed Interview with the Vampire April 2, 2024 ★★★★★ |
I'm not even going to try to properly summarise what this one's about, because who hasn't heard about this book by now, especially since Daniel Molloy's approach to this press tour appears to be "what bridge haven't I burned yet? Pass me the kerosene."
But let me just say that if the idea of a book written by a counter culture boomer version of Patrick Radden Keefe who's experiencing some kind of weird, sexy fever dream appeals to you, pick this one up. (There's actually a lot less explicit sex in it than the BookTok folk would make you think, though.)
The whole "this is a work of nonfiction, honest" thing is obviously just a marketing conceit, this is clearly fiction, but in a weird way I think Interview with the Vampire actually does fit into Molloy's body of work as a whole better than people have given it credit for. Molloy's always been interested in issues of memory, identity, cautionary tales, the costs of conforming and the costs of not being able to live in community, and you can see that really clearly here. This time, Molloy is just thinking about it through melodramatic Southern Gothic vampires instead of Ponzi scheme con artists who undermine the global economy.
I can't pretend I understand why he made this shift, but I do think it works almost in spite of itself. It helps that his tongue is clearly firmly in cheek.
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maggie_d reviewed Interview with the Vampire April 3, 2024 ★★★★★ |
He had a vision, and that vision was "two men fuck elaborately while floating in mid air", and I love that for him.
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fouloleron reviewed Interview with the Vampire April 3, 2024 ★★★☆☆ |
bb, what are you doing. either write your serious commentary on post-war paris and displaced anglophone counter-cultural beatnik fuckery OR go all in on your horny id fic about gay men banging, but this approach just falls between two stools. like if you're going to lust so obviously after hot vampire ass just tap it. it's YOUR book, who's stopping you. 3.5 stars.
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abiud_duiba reviewed Interview with the Vampire April 10, 2024 ★★★★☆ |
Strap in, my darlings, for a lengthy tale of the kind of shit that only happens when you live in proximity to the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
So I went into Interview with the Vampire prepared to like it, because I'd heard all the Discourse around it and also any book which makes Michiko Kakutani drop a Twitter thread like that has to be checked out. I was a couple chapters in and super intrigued by the sheer homo weirdness of it all when I heard that Daniel Molloy himself was in town and doing this spur-of-the-moment signing/Q&A at Prairie Lights tonight—so of course I had to go.
I'm upstairs waiting for the talk to begin when who do I see but Molloy at the front of the room having what looked like a very tense conversation with this tall twink dude who looks like a Victorian's idea of porn. (You know what I mean: big doe eyes, pre-Raphaelite curls, all covered up except for the collarbones which are on display in a way that says "take me, m'lud, for though I am virginal, lo, I have the Consumption.")
And when I say tense, I mean tense. Victorian tense. Somewhere, a Brontë fanned herself.
And that was before Molloy grabbed the other guy by the wrist. What. It was brief, but it happened!
Then the twink guy breaks away and comes and sits down two rows in front of me and this woman who's already sitting there (and crocheting something enormously and fabulously pink) starts chit chatting and asks him why he's there, is he a fan too? And this guy folds his arms and says, in an accent like he's some kind of minor British royal, "Well, Mr Molloy has already tutored me so well in the... literary arts... that I was keen to continue my education."
My darlings, my lovebirds, there is no HTML tag invented that lets me convey Twink Brit's tone of voice here. It was the most plausibly deniable form of filthy-nasty I have ever heard in my life. MISTAH MOLLOY, he said, in this kind of prim way that made me instantly think "Ohhhh, he has called that old man 'daddy.'" You just know he was being taught shit that isn't legal in Alabama.
Now, no one is going to cancel Daniel Fucking Molloy at this stage, because the guy's like an asbestos cockroach of journalism or something. I would put money on him outliving Keith Richards. But folks: I'm now pretty sure he's had some kind of late-life gay awakening and he's fucking his MFA students? Which is fucked up, but even fucked-er up is the fact that he's only taught on the east coast so is Molloy like... transporting twinky ass across state lines?
(Should I say "allegedly" here? Because I don't think Molloy is going to sue someone over a GoodReads review, but also I'm a grad student with no money, so: ALLEGEDLY transporting twinky ass.)
After all that, the reading was fine and a bit anticlimactic I guess. I could have sworn that the British guy actually asked Molloy questions at some point, but I can't remember them now, which is odd, considering. The whole hour went by really fast. Then I came home, I finished the rest of the book, I stared at the wall a bit when I was done. I think I'm going to deduct a star for him fucking his students, TEACHERS DON'T FUCK YOUR STUDENTS, but I'm going to add back a star for that one page-long footnote where Molloy reads Johnny Depp for filth. It was random, it was mean, it was correct.