Story within story within story, Rice constructs a convoluted tale that begins in the present as Lestat awakes from a long period of sleep to find himself in the 1980s. But she quickly flashes back to the eighteenth century to tell of Lestat's beginnings as the son of an impoverished French nobleman. She tells his story chronologically until he becomes a vampire and meets the vampire Armand. After an unfriendly confrontation, Armand tells his story to Lestat. Then later when Lestat finally meets Marius, Marius tells his story and then the story of Enkil and Akasha.

Rice's style is often talky, with some passages belaboring a scene or an idea until one wearies of it. Yet she handles description in a way to make her characters and scenes vivid and believable.

At times a sense of humor is apparent when characters react to something in an unexpected way...