The Gothic usually unfolds as an uncanny eruption of a past that refuses to stay buried and forgotten, and, as such, it is a primary way that New Orleans grapples publicly with the more disturbing aspects of its history. The Gothic is surely at the center of the city’s meaning for contemporary tourists, on one hand, and, on the other, much of its most cherished literature, from William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams to Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable, is rooted in the Gothic. None of these figures, however, have reached audiences on the scale that Anne Rice’s New Orleans novels have, for these quintessentially Gothic tales have come, for many hundreds of thousands of readers, to equate the city with vampires, a figure that has an obvious symbolic resonance with the slave-owning class that controlled the city for generations, to say nothing of the city’s associations with non-heteronormative sexuality.