The 50th anniversary edition of the spellbinding classic that started it all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author. This dazzling special edition features a jacket with foil and embossing, sprayed edges, designed endpapers, a new foreword from Leigh Bardugo, an afterword by Christopher Rice, and never-before-seen bonus pages from the original manuscript. Here are the confessions of a vampire: a hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual story of Louis de Pointe du Lac''s first two hundred years as one of the living dead. We begin on the night when Louis, disaffected and reluctant heir to a Louisiana plantation, is turned into a vampire by Lestat. Radiant, petulant, and powerful, Lestat becomes Louis’ companion and urges him to embrace the hungers and feelings of vampirism: the detachment, the hardened will, the "superior" sensual pleasures. As Louis struggles to retain the last residue of human feeling within him, he discovers must commit the ultimate act: to break away from his creator and discover the new world to which he belongs—whatever the cost. This is a story of danger and flight, of loyalty and treachery, of gaining humanity and losing it, and of the extraordinary power of the senses.