I’m not really interested in wrestling with what defines a classic. It’s the kind of question that fills up think pieces and podcasts with bouts of teeth gnashing and hand-wringing and endless rumination on the Western canon. But let’s agree on two things: the term is used too frequently, often in breathless blurbs (I may have committed this crime myself, so I’ll issue my apologies here), and no one lives long enough to see what truly becomes immortal.

Will Lestat live on as Dracula did? As Hamlet did? Will he enter our cultural canon and drag his creator along with him? I think so, and I’m going to make my case, but I can’t pretend it’s a scientific one. Science demands an experiment that can be reliably repeated, and if I knew the alchemy by which a character, a world, or a mythology lodges in our collective consciousness, I would deploy it myself. All authors hope their work will outlive them, but we understand that’s not a goal with a proper plan of action attached. It doesn’t matter how many books we sell or accolades we acquire. Most mega-bestsellers of eras past are forgotten, and even the award winners that make their way into academic syllabi fade into dusty bibliography. Only a mysterious few transcend this.

We can’t quantify what makes a Narnia or a Middle-earth, a Darcy or an Ebenezer Scrooge. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Nutcracker at tained a longevity and cultural cachet their other creations never touched. So let’s not pretend there’s a formula to be replicated. The process by which something passes from fiction into legend is mysterious, magical even. We can’t solve for this particular variable, but we can at least try to understand the sorcery Anne Rice worked when she wrote Interview with the Vampire.

In her own interviews, Rice acknowledged this novel as a response to the death of her daughter, Michele, the child she lost to leukemia. Claudia, often understood as the avatar for Michele, is the child vampire Louis had to love, lose, and grieve for Rice to attain any kind of catharsis. She wrote directly into the tradition of folklore, building a new cultural metaphor for the things that frighten and hurt us over the scaffolding of old monsters.

Vampire lore is often traced to anxiety around death and disease. As early as the first century, the Church had to prevent people from desecrating corpses they feared would return from the dead. We can connect the sudden uptick in paranoia around vampires (and the attempt to dig up bodies and chop off their heads or set fire to them) to the spread of rabies and pellagra in the 1700 s. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was at least partially inspired by his mother’s gruesome stories of the cholera outbreak she survived in Sligo. As people suffer the effects of disease, the vampire rises to plague our nightmares. It offers an otherworldly explanation for physical malady, but the monster also embodies a shared emotional response.

To read Anne Rice is to become both vampire and victim.

Rice understood and communicated this response through Louis’s physical transformation and emotional journey. What is the vampire really? Something that died but will not stay dead, that sustains itself by feeding on the living and destroying them in turn. Yes, this is a metaphor for plague, pollution, bodily corruption. But it’s also a metaphor for grief: You’re gone, but I see you still, hear you still, love you still. You’re gone and yet you haunt me. When we grieve, we lose our appetite and our capacity for pleasure. We struggle to enjoy the company of others. The depth of our loss can make us feel unfit for society. We know our pain is unpalatable to others, and so we have no choice but to hide it. Our joy in the world is drained away, along with our ability to feel fully human. We become monsters ourselves, hiding in our caves.

In the past I’ve described grief as a dirty fighter, the foe you think you’ve bested who pops back up with a sucker punch. But the vampire may be a better analogy: a creature who cannot accept death, who lives on and on, sustained by the love and loss we feel and keep feeling. Living with loss means discovering that time does not, in fact, heal all wounds, because time is itself the wound. We continue and we change, while those we lost remain the same, frozen in their final moments, made more perfect by memory. We age, we near death ourselves, the grief arrives less frequently, but it is never truly gone. Grief does not die. But we know we can.