Interview with the Vampire: how many books are in the Vampire Chronicles?

The full list

• Interview with the Vampire (1976) — Louis tells his story to a young reporter. The one that started it all.
• The Vampire Lestat (1985) — Lestat wakes in the 1980s, becomes a rock star, and sets the record straight.
• The Queen of the Damned (1988) — Akasha, mother of all vampires, rises. The trilogy's operatic finale.
• The Tale of the Body Thief (1992) — Lestat swaps bodies with a mortal. It goes badly.
• Memnoch the Devil (1995) — Lestat is given a tour of Heaven and Hell.
• The Vampire Armand (1998) — the 500-year backstory of the eternal teenager.
• Merrick (2000) — a Mayfair witch crosses into the vampire world.
• Blood and Gold (2001) — Marius's story, from Rome to the Renaissance.
• Blackwood Farm (2002) — Quinn Blackwood and his spirit double, Goblin.
• Blood Canticle (2003) — Lestat, Quinn, and the Mayfairs; Rice's farewell to the series for over a decade.
• Prince Lestat (2014) — the comeback, with vampirekind in crisis.
• Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016) — an ancient spirit's origin rewrites vampire history.
• Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat (2018) — the final novel, published three years before Rice's death on 11 December 2021.

What about Pandora and Vittorio?

Those two sit in a companion series called New Tales of the Vampires: Pandora (1998) and Vittorio the Vampire (1999). They share the universe but stand apart from Lestat's saga — hence 13 or 15, depending on how you count. Three of the main novels (Merrick, Blackwood Farm, and Blood Canticle) also cross over with Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy.

Where should you start?

Publication order. The first three books — Interview, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned — form the core arc, and everything afterwards builds on them. Conveniently, that's also the road the television series is travelling.

How the AMC show maps onto the books

AMC bought the rights to 18 of Rice's novels in 2020 and premiered Interview with the Vampire on 2 October 2022, with Jacob Anderson as Louis and Sam Reid as Lestat. The first two seasons covered the first book. Season 3 — retitled The Vampire Lestat — premiered on 7 June 2026 and adapts book two, complete with Lestat fronting an actual band, real released singles, and Sheila Atim's Akasha waiting in the wings for a Queen of the Damned payoff.

For the record: Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire in about five weeks in 1973, channelling her grief over the death of her five-year-old daughter — the inspiration for the child vampire Claudia. Forty-five years and fourteen books later, she gave Lestat the last word.