Lestat describes all existence as a Savage Garden, a paradise of exquisite beauty and a Purgatory of exquisite death. In this existence, human beings have such a great capacity to achieve remarkable feats of artistry and science, of comprehending the abstract in tandem with the empirical, of being mortal yet striving for immortality, whether by reputation or through religion. And all vampires are wanderers and hunters in the Savage Garden; they are exotica, nothing more than anomalous predators in the system of human frailty, because their extraordinary nature destroys the ordinary beauty of a single human life, even if that single human life happens to be the greatest savage in the Savage Garden, for even one life possesses an inherent dignity of being a human person—a living, breathing, thinking, creating individual that always has the opportunity to become better, to grow beyond the instinctive animalism in every human heart that sparks fear, which sparks anger, which sparks war, which sparks death. The Savage Garden is the irony of the human condition, that people are as beautiful as they are barbaric. And vampires are the epitome of that juxtaposition, railing against the cruelest adversary in the Savage Garden—Time—since no mortal can outrun, outthink, outgrow the passage of minutes and years. Everyone who lives eventually dies. And some who die are remembered, but even that memory is eaten by the passage of Time in the Savage Garden. Lestat’s greatest place to live is the most forsaken outpost in the Savage Garden, where he will live eternally under the loveliness and lawlessness, the hedonism and heroism of timeless New Orleans.
The Savage Garden appears in The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), Blood Canticle (2003), Prince Lestat (2014), Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016), and Blood Communion (2018). For more perspectives on the Savage Garden in the Vampire Chronicles, read the Alphabettery entry Lestat de Lioncourt.