| The New Yorker’s new TV critic, Inkoo Kang, makes her début this week in the magazine, offering trenchant praise for a series based on an old best-seller. AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire,” Kang writes, is a “lustily unfaithful adaptation” of the 1976 novel by Anne Rice, one that transforms the protagonist from white to Black and shifts the story’s “homoerotic subtext” into something “overtly queer.” The adjustments succeed. “By taking lavish and clever liberties with the source text,” Kang declares, “the series may well surpass Rice’s vision in resonance and complexity.” The smooth transition isn’t surprising. As the longtime staff writer Joan Acocella wrote, in 2009, vampires have existed in the imagination since ancient times, even before they became known for sucking blood. They took their current form, as dapper but menacing seducers, in the eighteen-hundreds, and have since evolved from a Transylvanian count to the brooding love interest of “Twilight.” Along the way, they have often stood in for the social anxieties of the day—about Jewish immigrants and women’s rights in Bram Stoker’s era and, in the U.S., about race and AIDS later on. Analyzed by the Freudians and embraced by artists such as Andy Warhol, they became hard to escape, both in the culture at large and for some of their most successful creators. The early-Hollywood actor Bela Lugosi “stamped the image of Dracula forever, and it stamped him,” Acocella reports. “He was buried in his Dracula cloak.” | 
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