So many thoughts here.
Not least the sense of mortality that comes when you realise a novel is fifty years old this year. That’s something I imagine Anne Rice’s protagonists might struggle to appreciate being, essentially immortal?
I’m going to nail my colours to the mast.
Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt? How couldn’t Lestat live on?
But neither of them is Dracula, nor Hamlet. And personally, having studied Gothic Literature at university, I found Interview with the Vampire the most disappointing novel on the module. In many ways, I wonder whether it benefited from a hiatus in mainstream vampire literature.
I could, if asked (hint, hint), recommend a few alternatives.
Suddenly, I’m wondering about the relationship between film adaptations and literary longevity. Do they keep books alive, or do they sometimes ensure that the characters survive while the books themselves fade from view?
Are film adaptations of books a kind of parasitic organism which sucks the lifeblood from the original text?
How often do you go back to re-read a book when a decent film version is available?
Over to you: which novels do you think have had their cultural lifespan extended by film adaptations? Which have been unfairly forgotten?
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