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In Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels it is forbidden to turn a child into a vampire because they never age, but Claudia could mature and grow intellectually.

If an infant, only a few months old, were bitten would it be able to walk and talk after a while, even though the babe will never age?

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No. It would mature very little. This is the problem with turning vampires in Anne Rice's literary works. A person's who is turned into a vampire finds their body is frozen in time at the moment they were when they turned.

As I have written in another Stackexchange article on Claudia:

  • Vampires (in Anne Rice's works) are both the sum of their human development and the sum of their physical skills and experience they acquired as adults. This is why vampires tended to make vampires of other adults, to expand their support structures and bring new and valuable experiences into their groups aiding in their survival.

I can see no lasting benefit for anyone to turn a baby into a a vampire because:

  • If a vampire were monstrous enough to turn a small baby into a vampire Childe, they would perpetually be trapped with a Vampire who body would never grow larger or much stronger, and be unable to find its own food, or develop any of the more useful vampiric abilities.

  • We are unclear how much of the Childe's mind would develop, would it be capable of language even as the vampiric improvement of its body commenced over time? How much capacity could the child-like body ever possess even if it came into control of its limbs due to the improvement capacity of vampirism.

It would certainly be no match for a fully formed, adult or even a young adult/pre-teen vampire. This would leave such a vampire in desperate (and perpetual) need of support.

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  • I seem to recall an episode of Angel where Angelus turned the daughter of a man hunting him into a vampire, thus forcing the hunter to kill his own child. I don't recall anything by Anne Rice being that... Sadistic.
    – James Sheridan
    Commented Mar 29, 2014 at 0:26
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    Rice's vampires had historical codes and precedence to guide them. Turn people who can help you be stronger, don't turn children, or the insane if you can help it. At the core of these ideas was self-preservation. Since you could no longer hear the mind of your Childe, you had to have some degree of trust and faith in their ability. But many people resented becoming Vampires over time, so this caused a schism between Maker and Childe. Rice's vampires had sadistic streaks too. Lestat's maker was a real monster!
    – Thaddeus Howze
    Commented Mar 29, 2014 at 0:48
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The primary reason I can think of to not turn an infant and child is that adults can essentially look the same for years without being noticed. An infant or child that wasn't growing would be more noticeable.

In the books it is clear that vampires' mental abilities increase with time. When Lestat's spirit is forced into a mortal man's body he complains how slow the mind works compared to his vampire body. An infant is going to be at a huge disadvantage though. The brain is still developing all through infancy and childhood. None of this additional development would take place. At 3 months the baby's vocal cords wouldn't be completely developed, so it probably wouldn't ever be able to talk.

Given those two limitations, I think it would probably be a feral vampire, incapable of speech or thought. It would also be incredibly dependent on whoever turned it into a vampire for a long long time (or forever).

When Claudia and Louis travel to Europe together, they find vampires in eastern Europe. wikipedia

They travel throughout eastern Europe first and do indeed encounter vampires, but these vampires appear to be nothing more than mindless animated corpses.

I believe that is what an infant vampire would be.

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  • Not to mention that infants cannot walk, their skulls are mushy, and they have a lot of cartilage where bone would be in an adult body.
    – Xantec
    Commented Mar 28, 2014 at 16:24

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