A Taliswoman Short — Interview with the Vampire, the glamorous, heart-wrenching, blood-drenched book that introduced the world to the Vampire Lestat and his creator, Anne Rice, was published in 1976. I was far too young to read it then; I’d just been born in 1972, the same year that Anne’s 5-year-old daughter died of a rare sort of leukemia. The blood again. They say that was when Anne became obsessed with blood as a carrier of both death and possibility.