Have you ever been struck with a question and the burning need to answer it? I was struck with such a question: Do vampires poop?
A quick internet search yielded no satisfactory answer, unlike most quick internet searches for my other recent questions like What is the capital of Yemen? or Who is Top Gear's The Stig? or How is wicker made?.
Instead of an answer, I found many people asking the same question. The only references I could find were statements of the lack of sources from which to draw a conclusion. So, I decided to email the Queen of Vampires, Anne Rice, and find out. My emails were answered unbelievably quickly, and the exchange below took a matter of perhaps ten minutes from start to end.
So, for the curious: Vampires don't poop! They convert the ingested blood directly to energy, to feed the supernatural forces that sustain them.
Good evening!
Firstly I'd just like to say that, probably like most people who write to you, I'm a huge fan of your work. I grew up reading your earlier work, and while I understand that your lifestyle has changed and you may want to distance yourself from the Vampire Chronicles, they were certainly memorable reads for me!
I do have a few questions for you that always bothered me over the years, and the mythology you built, though thorough, never addressed them. Not that I blame you for leaving out such trifles! On the contrary, I think there was probably so much left on the cutting room floor to keep the focus on the more important parts!
I'd like to ask, honestly, how do vampires deal with issues of bodily waste? It would seem to me that, ingesting blood while not eliminating any excreta would either cause the vampire to become slowly more dense over time, as the solid parts of the blood remain and the water portion of the plasma evaporates, or there would have to be some pseudobiological function going on.
It always seemed to me, and pardon my crudeness, that vampires must poop scabs.
Is this something you have ever considered, and, if so, what conclusions did you arrive at?
Thank you for your time, and God bless!
Vampires have no issues of bodily waste.
When Lestat goes back into a human body in The Tale of the Body Thief,
he has to confront human waste for the first time in 200 years. And he has a terrible time.
The Vampire body does not make waste. They don't eat or drink. They absorb the
blood they drink.
--
Anne Rice
Wow! What a fast response! I have another question for you, though, if you don't mind!
I understand that they absorb the blood they drink, but that's actually the root of my question. Blood weighs about 1.06 kilograms per liter; in US units, that's almost 9 pounds per gallon. So does the Vampire simply gain this weight indefinitely, eventually weighing thousands of pounds after years of feeding, or is the blood converted into energy somehow?
Please pardon me if this is esoteric, or beyond the scope of fiction!
Thanks!
It's converted into energy. It sustains him the way water would
sustain a human being, but there is no waste. The body, which is dead,
and now a host for a supernatural or discarnate entity, consumes what it takes
in.
--
Anne Rice
Thanks so much!
I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to answer my
questions! I hope whatever you're working on comes to fruition, and
have a nice evening!
No, this isn't a joke. Well, it isn't a joke at least as far as the email exchange really happened. The emails are included as references. E2 links in my emails were not present in the original.
The original formatting has been left intact, and I stripped out all of the header information, and part of Anne Rice's signature block in order to minimize the length of the excerpts - if you're curious, the cut part of the signature block was, as follows: my website, my Facebook, my YouTube 1, my YouTube2