The first season of the AMC/AMC+ series Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire made our list of our favorite book-to-screen adaptations of 2022, and with good reason. In Rice’s classic 1976 gothic-horror novel, New Orleanian vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac gives an interview to a 1970s journalist, recalling his struggles after Lestat de Lioncourt—a colorful, petulant, and deeply self-centered creature of the night—gave him the “dark gift” of vampirism two centuries before. It provided Louis with supernatural abilities and effectively made him immortal, but it also gave him a thirst for human blood, which sent him into a spiral of philosophical soul-searching. Later, Lestat turned a 5-year-old girl named Claudia into a vampire—in part, to make sure that Louis didn’t abandon him. As decades passed, Claudia’s resentment grew, and things became more complicated when the trio ran into other vampires, including powerful coven leader Armand.

The show’s first season acted as a sort of reboot of Rice’s novel. It’s set nearly half a century after the original interview; Louis (Game of Thrones’ Jacob Anderson), who still looks like he’s in his 20s, offers the now-middle-aged journalist (Eric Bogosian) another sit-down, so that Louis can correct the record about his fraught relationship with Lestat (Sam Reid). Created by Rolin Jones, the series unambiguously foregrounded the novel’s gay subtext and tackled other topics that Rice scarcely addressed, including systemic racism in the American South. It all made for a viewing experience of impressive depth, which also retained the appealingly operatic style of Rice’s original text. Like the best fan fiction, it paid affectionate tribute to its inspiration while enriching it with thoughtful new additions.

The second season of the show finished up the first novel and introduced a few elements of the second, 1984’s Kirkus-starred The Vampire Lestat. But the latest, third season tackles Lestat in earnest, even changing the name of show to signal its new, ambitious venture. It premieres on AMC and AMC+ on June 7.

In Rice’s sequel, Lestat takes center stage—literally: As the story opens, it’s the 1980s, and he’s the lead singer in a rock band, of all things. The group used to be called Satan’s Night Out, but its new frontman soon renamed it The Vampire Lestat, in a characteristic display of self-love. Such blatant displays of one’s bloodsucking nature, though, are against vampire law, and this puts Lestat in mortal danger.

However, this reckoning doesn’t happen until the end of the novel; until then, narrator Lestat spends most of his time regaling readers with his lengthy life story, which began in France in 1760, when he was born into a family of fallen nobility. As a young man, he received the dark gift from ancient vampire Magnus, and Lestat later gave it to his close friend, violinist Nicholas de Lenfent, and his tuberculosis-wracked mother, Gabrielle; his travels later brought him into Armand’s circle, and into the company of the oldest vampires in existence. Lestat also revisits the events of Interview, taking issue with some of its scenes as Louis described them—although here, as in the rest of The Vampire Lestat, one can never be sure how reliable the narrator is.

In the new show, one can’t help but smile when rock-star Lestat asks, onstage, “Are there any readers in the audience tonight?” Once again, showrunner Jones closely follows Rice’s plot, but he adds intriguing new themes. Lestat’s deep fear of abandonment is a key element, for example, aided by the show’s focus on how he was abused in his younger days—by Magnus, and by his mother, Gabrielle. In the book, Lestat’s and Gabrielle’s relationship is weirdly close, but in the show, it’s straightforwardly incestuous; it’s a bold move, and the show deals with this history in compelling ways. In another new plotline, Louis grapples with his guilt about Claudia in troubling ways.

That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty of humor in the show; Lestat’s narration (as delivered by Reid in a go-for-broke performance) is frequently a hoot, sometimes recalling the pop-culture-obsessed work of Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno, Jennifer’s Body). At one point, for instance, a hard-partying Lestat refers to “MDMA and LSD: the Torvill and Dean of hallucinogenics.” Lestat’s autobiographical, glam-rock-inspired tunes are also fun, as are his prickly, banter-y exchanges with Louis, Armand, and many others. The first six episodes made available to critics deliver a wonderful adaptation that deeply respects the source material, but it also has the guts to add some new blood. There’s plenty here for Rice’s fans to seek their teeth into—and it will whet their appetite for a potential fourth season, which, one hopes, will serve up Rice’s wild 1988 novel, The Queen of the Damned.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.