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The novel opens with the narrator, who is a vampire, offering to tell the story of his life to an interviewer referred to only as “the boy” (the vampire likely calls him this because he’s a child in comparison to the vampire, but he’s probably in his twenties). When the vampire dramatically opens the blinds to reveal his pale skin and luminous green eyes, the boy is startled, but he agrees to continue with the interview, aware of the vampire’s power but too intrigued to stop. The vampire assures him that he means no harm, and tells him how important it is that he has his story recorded.

He begins by recounting his mortal life, saying he was turned into a vampire at the age of 25, in the year 1791. Before that, he lived a peaceful, privileged life on an indigo plantation in Louisiana, where he was the eldest son in a wealthy French Catholic family. While his mother, sister, and their enslaved workers carried on with daily life, his younger brother grew increasingly devout and withdrawn, consumed by religious fervor. After the death of their father, the responsibility of taking care of the household and the plantation fell to the narrator, who tried to support his brother by building him a private oratory. Despite this, his brother continued to withdraw from his family and become even more obsessive about his faith.

The vampire tells the interviewer that he loved his brother deeply, but became more and more concerned with his increasingly extreme beliefs. At fifteen, the brother began experiencing visions in which saints urged him to sell the family estate and travel to France to serve the Church. He pleaded with the narrator to give up everything and follow him, but the narrator refused, dismissing the idea as both irrational and absurd.
After a heated argument between the narrator and his brother, his brother fell to his death from a staircase. The narrator was consumed with guilt and was tortured by his own conscience and by the implied accusations of his family and those around him. His grief drove him to become a drunk, and his sister fell into a deep depression.. Rumors spread among the enslaved people that the brother’s ghost still haunted the plantation, throwing the narrator even deeper into despair.

Over time, the narrator became obsessed with death, beginning to view it as a kind of escape. At his lowest point, he was attacked by a vampire who nearly drained him of blood, leaving him close to death. As he recovered from the encounter, he confessed his guilt to a priest, sharing his argument with his brother and the pain of his remorse. The priest was cold and judgemental in response, saying that his brother was crazy and possessed by the devil, and claiming it was the devil who had pushed him to his death. Furious, the narrator lashed out, nearly beating the priest to death. In that moment, driven by anger, sadness, and a mysterious new power, he sensed that a transformation had begun inside himself. 

In the present day, Louis tells the interviewer that the priest’s condemnation of his brother reflected his own internal guilt. He explains that people are often more willing to believe in evil because it’s easier than accepting the possibility of true goodness.

Returning to the past, Louis recounts the moment the vampire who had once attacked him returned and revealed his name: Lestat. Lestat attacked Louis again, draining his blood. When the interviewer asks if this was what Louis wanted, Louis clarifies that he didn’t exactly choose it—but at that point, it felt like the only path left available to him.
Louis describes watching his final sunrise and saying goodbye to his human life. When the interviewer asks what the transformation felt like, Louis compares it to trying to describe sex to someone who’s never experienced it—an indescribable mix of sensation and change. Afterward, Lestat cut his own wrist and pressed it to Louis’s mouth, urging him to drink. Suddenly overcome with instinct, Louis did. That act—drinking Lestat’s blood—completed Louis' transformation into a vampire.

Afterward, Lestat moved into Louis’s plantation, putting his blind, elderly father in the master bedroom. Louis had not yet accepted what he had become; that turning point came when he was forced to witness Lestat murder the plantation overseer. As Louis says, “I was to watch and approve; that is, to witness the taking of a human life as proof of my commitment and part of my change.” Though Louis no longer feared his own death, he was pained by the death of others and haunted by his brother’s fate. Watching Lestat drain and kill the overseer horrified Louis and confirmed his fear: that his new “life” as a vampire would be filled with death. Lestat, in comparison, treated the killing casually, seeming almost delighted.

After the murder, Louis and Lestat removed the overseer’s valuables and beat his body in order to disguise the fact that he’d been drained of all his blood. Louis, to his shame and disgust, felt a kind of dark thrill. He describes the transformation as both seductive and frightening. Despite the power he was gaining, he found himself filled with grief and remorse. He returned to the staircase where his brother had died and begged Lestat to kill him.

Instead, Lestat suddenly bit him, and for the first time, called him by name: Louis. As Lestat drank his blood, he told Louis he would drain him until he was on the brink of death. Louis, too weak to resist, gives in to the experience. In the present, he tells the interviewer that it was painful and intimate. Back in the past, Lestat then opened his own wrist and pressed it to Louis’s mouth. As Louis drank, he became insatiable, overwhelmed by the sound of their heartbeats.

In the present, the interviewer nervously flips the cassette tape, unsettled by the intensity of the story.

Shifting again to the past, Louis describes the transformation as feeling like he could see the world for the first time. Lestat laughed maniacally, telling Louis to step into the night and embrace his newfound identity. Louis walked past his brother’s oratory, and, realizing that his human life was truly over, did not feel sadness. But as his human body began to die, he was wracked by pain and became furious that Lestat hadn’t prepared him for the transformation.

Lestat nonchalantly admitted that he hadn’t made any arrangements for Louis’ transition, and hadn’t even gotten a coffin for Louis to sleep in, a concept that shocked and horrified Louis. Lestat’s father asked Lestat where he went every night, and Lestat snapped in reply that he could do whatever he wanted. Louis, meanwhile, found himself hypnotized by the sight of the old man—especially his blood vessels and his teeth—and felt his new vampiric instincts beginning to surface. When the man asked for his rosary before bed, Louis was too entranced to respond.
Back in the present, the interviewer interrupts Louis to ask whether popular vampire myths are true: an inability to look at crosses, the power to turn into mist, or vulnerability to being killed by a stake to the heart. Louis calmly replies that none of these are real.

He continues his story, explaining that Lestat insisted they share a coffin that first day. Even though he was claustrophobic, Louis had no choice—he had to find shelter from the sun, because exposure to sunlight would kill him. Lestat got into the coffin, and as Louis lay on top of him, he began to feel his human fears fade, and he felt repulsed and fascinated in equal measure.

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