Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
The Vampire's Emptiness: When Forever Isn't Enough | August 24, 2025
In this episode, Father Wolf explores Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire" to uncover spiritual truths about life's meaning and the emptiness of immortality without God. Through this unexpected vacation read, he examines how even horror literature reveals our deepest spiritual hungers and the universal quest for salvation.
• Reading Anne Rice's vampire novel after her conversion memoir "Called Out of Darkness"
• Rice's brief return to Catholicism followed by her departure from the faith
• The vampire mythology as metaphor for life without transcendent meaning
• Horror literature as reflection of comfortable societies with existential questions
• The vampire's immortality becoming a curse rather than blessing
• Suicide as the ultimate end for vampires facing eternal emptiness
• The contrast between CS Lewis's Ransom character and Rice's vampires
• Modern parallels: how we seek meaning in extended time rather than divine purpose
We must recognize that salvation is more than immortality—it's finding meaning and purpose in life both now and eternally.
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolfe. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in His Word. And now your host, father Don Wolfe.
Speaker 2:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. While on vacation I was able to enjoy one of my favorite hobbies, which, of course, is reading. During my days of rest I was able to get to a book I'd wanted to read for a long time. It might seem odd, but I'd always wanted to read Interview with the Vampire by Annie Rice and I'm glad I had a chance to get to it.
Speaker 2:My interest was first piqued when she published her book about her conversion. It's titled Called Out of Darkness. It was the first thing I'd ever paid attention to by her, and in this work she detailed her decision to return to the faith of her childhood. As she dissected the history of her journey through the darkness of her life In her book I found out about her fascination with New Orleans, her inspiration from the broken, supernatural characters of her novels, as well as her desire to have some integral response to the needs she had become aware of in her own life. She was also quite open about her history of brokenness and the interruptions of her life that prompted so much of the sadness present in her work. I found this book to be an eye-opener about her and about the potential of the faith to animate the imagination of even the most unlikely people.
Speaker 2:Now, after publishing this account of her return to the faith, she very quickly decided to leave the church again. She had a hard time with the moral strictures of Catholic life, especially when it came to its teaching about the Sixth Commandment. Now, anne Rice isn't unique in her ability or her difficulty with accommodating herself to the teachings of the Church, but her willingness to abandon what she found was a disappointment, especially since she described the darkness that had overcome her life amid the tragedies she endured growing up. She couched her leaving as an example of support for those who do not find themselves and their decisions to fit comfortably inside the church's doctrine. But I always thought it was the power of darkness within that eventually overtook the light that had found her. It was, in my opinion, just one more tragedy for her, but upon reading this book I found out she had a huge worldwide following. Her vampire series, beginning with the notable Interview with the Vampire, had propelled her into international stardom.
Speaker 2:Now I have to admit I'm old-fashioned when it comes to authors and their books, and I was never aware of how much publishers promote their authors' works through the medium of internet notoriety. Their books and I was never aware of how much publishers promote their authors' works through the medium of internet notoriety. But I quickly found out that she was a product of a great deal of high-level interest that had been garnered by her internet presence, which made me all the more interested in reading her cornerstone novel. It was written a long time before Called Out of Darkness, so I was also interested in finding if there were any clues there in her work, some trail of breadcrumbs to follow, indicating that she may have been revealing more about her inner conflicts to her readers than she was able to admit to herself at the time. Needless to say, as I brought the book along with me, I was restless to settle in for the journey through her imagination, and I have to say it was pretty interesting. Since the story was made into a movie, you probably know the outline of the plot A journalist who receives almost no description of himself in the novel and so substitutes for the reading public who's interested in the broad topic, rather than a deep dive into the fine-grained self-understanding of the main character which you would get from an exhaustive back-and-forth interview the journalist.
Speaker 2:This unnamed journalist sits and talks with the vampire. There's little incredulity from the interviewer who sits and listens to the vampire's account. The sum of the novel is the account from this man concerning his history and the ins and outs of the life he's lived since having been made into that type of creature. In fact, the journalist is entranced with the story so thoroughly he just goes along with what he's hearing, with little to no pause to ask or to respond, and the vampire simply fills him in while on the journeys and details of his life.
Speaker 2:An Anglo-Irish author, bram Stoker, is regarded as the father of vampire literature. His novel Dracula virtually began that type of horror story. The character of Count Dracula has been adapted countless times, especially in movies, to become one of the most well-known figures from fiction. He might not be quite as well known as Romeo and Juliet, but the stories about him and his Transylvania castle, as they play crucial parts in the plots of stories and movies, vastly outnumber those of the love-besotted couple of the Montagues and the Capulets. Even today, the novel is an easy read, with almost all of the details of vampire lore present in it In many ways his work published at the turn of the 20th century, as published in 1897, began to form the imagination of the whole new age that was breaking into the world then, and not just in literature.
Speaker 2:As many have pointed out, the story takes place amid the rugged passes and snowy peaks of the Carpathians. That was the remote outback of Europe, a place of unknown dangers and incomplete maps, where the run-up to the First World War began. Since almost no one traveled there, it was the perfect setting for a character of unparalleled proclivities and unbeforehand described dangers, in all of the dark threats lying in wait there. It was as if the author of this horror novel was trying to tell the world of the great peril lurking in the darkened east. Intentionally or not, the author began this century by describing what lay in wait for the people of the time. It was in that place where the First World War began.
Speaker 2:It would be an overstatement to maintain that Anne Rice revived the vampire theme in contemporary literature. Certainly, this element of storytelling was very much alive before she sat down to write, but she did bring a level of notoriety to it by the quality of her work and the depth of her creativity that she invested in it. Her characters are not one-dimensional and they're not boring. Perhaps better than any other writer, she brought a level of self-awareness to the characters such that the reader could feel empathy for their struggles and some identification with their challenges. Reading the book through this character fades into the night, tinged by sadness and beset by loneliness. Not only that, the vampire is sad to think anyone would find the description of the life that he engages in attractive or interesting. It's an odd novel, but a hugely creative one.
Speaker 2:Those who analyze these things have opined that the vampire theme is actually a veiled Victorian description of the dangers of venereal disease. The infected creature is cut off from true society and can never circulate in the daylight. The vampire is made into this category of being only by congress with another, and once the transition takes place there's no going back or changing. According to the descriptions in the stories, the making of a vampire can only take place with some assent of the one who is so made. That is, this doesn't happen by accident, no matter what the vampire later thinks of what he has become.
Speaker 2:Just as the zombie theme in horror literature is prompted by the fear of drug abuse and addiction and seems to have taken up permanent residence in our age, so also vampires and their lore are very much a part of what I meant to be a 20th century citizen. Horror fiction seems to be the prospect of the prosperous and the settled. Surely, there are scary stories in every society and among all peoples, but it takes a special social arrangement to be comfortable with the desire to tell stories that deliberately propel people to fear and discomfort. And only the citizens of a time and place who feel generally comfortable with their setting and generally prosperous in their circumstance could take the time to invest in being scared by what they watch and read. When war threatens or when the violence of the time can undermine every aspect of life, or when it requires a full-time commitment to maintain self-defense, no one will pay for being deliberately scared by accounts of uncontrollable powers and dark forces. That such horror is marketable is itself its own curiosity, and such is our time. Now.
Speaker 2:The story in the novel unfolds in a rather expected way. The main character meets and is offered the option for becoming an immortal creature of the night. You might say he was seduced into this option by the vampire that made him being offered the option for becoming an immortal creature of the night. You might say he was seduced into this option by the vampire that made him being offered the option to live forever. As in all human endeavors, there is a price implicit in the offer, and it is that he cannot operate in the daylight. From the moment of his transition, he will operate only at night. He'll sleep during the daylight hours, always free from sunlight, and he will live only on blood. Not only will he not be able to eat anything else to sustain him, he won't be interested in any other sustenance, including the drugs or alcohol that might otherwise seduce others into addiction, but he will live forever with incredible recuperative powers and never growing older.
Speaker 2:The vampire once made is frozen in place, becoming a creature of the night that neither grows nor changes. Any kind of blood is sufficient to keep him alive, but human blood is preferred not only because it's the most sustaining, but also because it's the most fulfilling way of living. The vampire not only is kept alive by the blood itself, but by the conquest of the one whom he kills in feeding. Vampire immortality is only at the price of the life of another. In the case of these creatures, for whom a century can pass in a flash, the price of their living is the lives of thousands. In the description during the interview, the search for and the conquest of the one whose life maintains this immortality is the source of satisfaction and completeness.
Speaker 2:During the interview, the vampire describes the initial attraction to this type of life. In it he has the prospect of fulfilling the artistic and refined life that so much attracted him and his sensibilities as a young man. Vampire life heightens the normal awareness and their antennae of creativity. Being newly filled with these sensitivities allowed him the prospect of enjoying every aspect of art and expression or whatever human striving that he feels. Not only that, he was mourning the early death of the important people in his life and felt overcome by the constraints and unfairness of capricious mortality. So he imagined his life would be forever expanded by the endless potential of forever. Plus, there's the erotic touch of the great forbidden attraction of playing with and then twisting the fabric of the universe. By giving himself over to this race of immortals, he engages the great final taboo against the iron constraints of death. He has trespassed against the final verdict of the divine on the limitations of the human race as he enters a whole other category of being.
Speaker 2:In this novel there is no transcendence, no place for a divine being whose presence fills the universe or whose law occupies the moral space of human society. The vampire lives out centuries with no real thought about the ultimate purpose of life or the meaning of being Vampire. Literature began in the dying light of vivid religious sensibilities at the turn of the 20th century and now has been revived in a flat universe completely devoid of God. Even for an immortal creature destined by his options to live without end, in the novel there's no thought or concern about the morality of his living, beyond some vague intuitions about the ultimate horror of being responsible for the death of untold thousands. But even these anxieties about killing are quelled by the frequency of it.
Speaker 2:Annie Rice has created a storied universe in which there is no greater horizon than the interpersonal and the immediate. It's filled with art and finery, ease and quest and the comfort of wealth, but not with God, or blessing or beatitude. But not with God, or blessing or beatitude. Even before the final denouement of the story, the characters feel the emptiness of their lives and the hollowness of the years they live in, an endless world of one thing after the other and nothing else. So what does a novel about vampires have to do with the life of faith and the reality of God. Quite a lot, actually.
Speaker 2:Anne Rice was a long way from considering the possibilities of belief when she wrote this novel, but she was haunted by the great question that arises in the middle of everyone's nighttime darkness, which is what is the meaning of life? What better way to explore the answer to this question than by exploring a character who cannot die? This becomes an especially intricate and timely contemporary question if the exploration happens in a novelistic world in which theism is of no account, without an appeal to God and God's revelation and without bothering about the intricacies and the specificity of belief. If there is a meaning to life that accumulates as it unfolds through the years, then that meaning could be applied to the meager lives we lead. Or to put it another way, if there is a hidden purpose to life, it may be that we can't see it because we just don't have enough perspective.
Speaker 2:After all, we gallop through our years, passing from one stage to another, preoccupied by the sudden eruptions of changes in relationships and responsibilities. Perspective After all, we gallop through our years passing from one stage to another, preoccupied by the sudden eruptions of changes in relationships and responsibilities, so that we often don't have a chance to consider life itself. Until we're so old, we become burdened by the additional bother of declining health and shortened prospects. By the time we begin to notice the splendor of life, it's nearly over. By the time we've gotten to understand the possibilities and the potentials of what it really means to truly live, we've reached a point in which our living is nearly finished. So, having untold hundreds of years to investigate the potential for life, a person could legitimately figure out what it's all about and what it could mean, and what it means for the one who has encountered it.
Speaker 2:But alas, in this novelistic universe where there are those creatures who live forever without the prospect of aging or maturing, without the inevitability of sickness and causality, the possibilities don't multiply with the years. This is the great discovery of the vampire experience. Life without a goal, piling up years without connection or direction, is empty and meaningless. The author never gets around to saying it, perhaps because she couldn't countenance it. But endless life without God and the goodness woven into the fabric of the universe, without the goodness woven into the fabric of the universe, is simply endless hopelessness. She uses this figure, which is a compelling component corner of the vampire legacy, if there are those who become vampires simply by what's done to them by other vampires, and if they live forever in the shadows of the night, what keeps the world from being overrun by them? They're fictional characters and exist only in this novelistic world. We're not dealing with a true existential question, but inside the world in which this novelist can create, what keeps that world from becoming infested with vampires piling up their victims in drifts of corpses every night? And the answer is suicide.
Speaker 2:Annie Rice discloses that vampire life is so lonely, so frighteningly isolated and dark they kill themselves out of despair. It's not easy living forever on the blood of your victims, knowing your survival is only by killing and destroying. Plus, there's no pathway, no quest not entered into and then completed. Eventually, the spice of life goes flat and the future collapses into the damnation of one day after another, after another. And when this happens, as it does to vampires everywhere, they just give up living.
Speaker 2:This curious addendum to the vampire universe is the highlight of her novel. It occurs in the last third of her book and makes the previous two-thirds worth reading, and it highlights the ultimate theme of the whole book, which is life and its meaning. What does life mean when you can live forever? Oh, not just any life, but one intensified in its awareness of artistic possibilities. But even those refinements begin to drop away as the centuries pile up. Eventually life becomes a slog amounting to no more than years. Passions, cool, even the fine-tuned senses for the hunt and its conquest eventually becomes no more than survival. All comes to nothing as the years turn into nothing. At the end of the book there's a long summation by the main character. It's several pages of indictment of this life filled with so much possibility that goes nowhere. To get a sense of a parallel and opposite reflection on the meaning of life, I thought of the long reflection of the main character, ransom, in CS Lewis's novel Paralandra.
Speaker 2:In this novel the character has come face to face with what it will cost to resist the devil. It may cost him his life, he knows. But he weighs up the truth he faces. He understands his life has led him to this point. Investing it in the decisive action he has to take is what has created his life. And he knows he is to invest it in this moment, knowing he could lose, knowing the outcome could be catastrophic for an entire world if he fails. He is ennobled in the challenge. The character leaves the comfort of his soliloquies and goes to meet his opponent, man-to-man, good-to-evil, in Interview with the Vampire.
Speaker 2:The reflection by the vampire is also about the meaning of life. The friends he has spent hundreds of years with all of whom he's grown tired of, exhausted with their foibles and their narrowness, stupefied by their selfishness and vanity. The friends have all gone. He rages at the ultimate meaninglessness of his life, even as he shouts at the crushing possibility of living it forever. He does not long for death yet, but he feels the burden of knowing life just goes on. Rice brilliantly draws out the tendrils of his experience to assure us and to inform him that there are no more avenues, no additional aspects of life open to him. He's tasted life by the bucket full and he has grown sated. Ultimately, he wants no more. By the time you finish this book, I'd think you want to run out and find a savior. Perhaps that was her intention. Maybe it's no accident that this is exactly what she did eventually.
Speaker 2:The truth is, most of us live a version of the vampire's prospect. We imagine the meaning of our lives played out over the fullness of time and we figure that if we just had more of it we'd be more satisfied. We slough off our anxieties by stretching them out past the horizon, so we never see their edges. We get lost in the intricacies of our interests and imagine them to be infinite, so as to never consider their boundaries or the true limitations of our attention. Finally, we decide that our personalities and their configurations are pliable and repairable, never imagining they might be ingrained and frozen In our insouciance. We always figure, if we had the prospect, we could repair the cracks putty over the seams, lengthen the possibilities and make all things better. If we just had the chance to be more ourselves for longer.
Speaker 2:But it's the vampire who describes a life in which he's lost. Having all we imagine as necessary, his life is still damned At the end. Whatever the character the novel is crying out for at the end, whatever it is he's crying out for, it is ultimately salvation. He's lost and cannot be found unless there's some outside agency, something extra available to him to rescue him from the horrors of his endless life. Being the creature he is, he has become the extreme example of the modern man, has been forced to confront the bankruptcy of his confidence. This lost soul will never find the gateway to true life. He's condemned to living the constraints and the flaws of his life endlessly and without hope of change. He has no prospect of hope except to imagine there might be something up ahead, although he knows there's truly nothing. Of course we know the price of vampire life. According to the lore, he said he can never circulate in daytime. All has become darkness, the source of light, and all life on earth is denied him. Perhaps if the price of immortality was not quite so high he could thrive in it.
Speaker 2:What if they were not vampires at all, but simply merely immortals? But in vampire lore, the blood they consume and the way they achieve it is to intertwine them even more intimately with the people of their time. They're not recluses living life as if in a monastery or away from the heartbeat of society. Vampires have to circulate in society and occupy the night if they want to live. Their unique characteristics throw them into the intricacies of the world and thus highlight the frustrations of their life. You might say these vampiric aspects detail their lostness.
Speaker 2:Annie Rice did a remarkable job reflecting on the meaning of life. It's a true horror novel. I can't think of anything more terrifying than being lost eternally. Perhaps as we read we might reflect on the truth that salvation is more than a quest of immortality. It's the prospect of meaning and the precedent for living here and now, that is, unless you imagine waking up in the dark for the rest of your days. As an option, read it, I think you might enjoy it Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment Faith in Verse.
Speaker 2:We have a poem today called why Me Now? Why me? Why me? She said through her tears. Of all the others, he's the one that's dead. Why me? Why him, she cried. Why him? Of all those there, he's the one who died. Why him? The tears rolled down past her wrinkles and her folds, past the marks of her years, down Her chest, heaved the sobs, pierced the air and struck us all as we grieved with her. He was there and gone in a moment, taken in an accident, one second light as air, then gone. And now she's here to cry and mourn, to endure the day, to endure the sum of tears alone. She, such is living the light and promise the cruel truth of gravity's ceaseless pull, taking and giving short, hard life. That's why Me Now, to live life is to live it here and now so that, as we're appointed to the goodness and the fullness of life. We can live it in the hereafter. I hope you can join us in the days to come.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.