ICON:
Anne Rice

words by Randy Gambill
photo by Robert Todd Williamson

Anne Rice, Goth writer-extraordinaire turned Christian novelist has had a life journey as rich and labyrinthine as one of her atmospheric novels. Best known for her influential vampire book trilogy, she came to public attention in 1976 with the publication of the first in this series and arguably her most legendary work “Interview with the Vampire”. Rice’s ingeniously titled tome tapped into something primal, spinning the lushly gothic and highly homoerotic tale of Louis, a tormented bloodsucking hero thrust into an immortal battle of love and hate with the Machiavellian Vampire Lestat. Set largely in Rice’s hometown of New Orleans (which she would return to and leave again), “Interview” is a rich, evocative world of love, death, sexual fluidity, and immortality; and by using vampires as an allegory for the human condition, they cleverly stirred that elusive zeitgeist while adding depth and dimension to a potentially campy enterprise. The influence of this single work is so immense it can safely be said that in effect, it created modern Goth culture and vampire literature, not to mention the vampire lifestyle. Rice wrote the first novel in a dark period of her life after the death of her young daughter from leukemia, and this pain and spiritual crisis infused what is essentially a pulpy narrative with a kind of dark existential resonance that will surely make this book as immortal as one of her supernatural characters.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Rice’s birth name (after her father) is Howard Allen O’Brien, an unusual moniker for a little girl, and it was given to Rice by her bohemian (and prescient) mother who thought “that naming a woman Howard was going to give that woman an unusual advantage in the world.” Rice became “Anne” on her first day of school when a nun asked her what her name was and she immediately blurted out “Anne”. Her mother, who was with her and knew how self-conscious her daughter was of her name, let it go without correcting her. Rice moved from New Orleans with her family to Texas where she met her husband, the late poet Stan Rice. They both ended up in San Francisco, where she attended San Francisco State University. Rice lived there during the heady period of the 1960’s and recounts about her time spent there, “I’m a totally conservative person. In the middle of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960’s I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass.” Rice may have not been under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs but this tumultuous period did have an effect on the creation of the first vampire book - the story of an alienated being searching for some meaning in a nihilistic world. Rice thought of it as a metaphor for her own search for hope in the turbulent 60’s.

Rice’s literary career was a slow corker. The first vampire book published in the 70’s was a gradually rising cult phenomenon, and she wrote only one other book during this decade. In the 80’s the remaining two books in the vampire trilogy, “The Vampire Lestat” and “Queen of the Damned”, were released along with a slew of other works. Anne Rice, the prolific author, began to emerge. With the introduction of the Mayfair Witch book trilogy, which began with “The Witching Hour” in the early 90’s, Rice became a full-fledged cult phenomenon. Rice’s literature created an entire world of poetically disaffected supernatural beings aching in gothic loneliness. The world of Goth culture and punk and alternative music were the first to find spiritual meaning and creative inspiration in Rice’s dense universe. (The Australian pop band Savage Garden found their name in “The Vampire Lestat,” in which Lestat describes the world as “the savage garden.”) Eventually the film world caught on, most famously with the 1994 adaptation of Interview with the Vampire starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Rice also wrote erotica, delving into S & M and adult sexuality with “Exit to Eden” and “Belinda” written under the pseudonym Anne Rampling and she penned full blown erotica under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure.

The biggest surprise in her spiritual journey may have arrived in 1996 when Rice returned to her roots in the Roman Catholic faith after spending most of her adult life as a self-described atheist. In 2004 she reaffirmed her Catholic faith as she announced to Newsweek that she would “write only for the Lord.” She calls “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” her first novel in the Christian genre and published in 2005, it marked the beginning of a trilogy that chronicles the life of Jesus. Her latest book in this series, “Christ the Lord: the Road to Cana” was released this March. Many of her Goth fans feared she would renounce her earlier dark works, though Rice steadfastly defends them as part of a literary history of moral works with dark themes, though she claims she regrets using the term vampire in her trilogy and would never again write another vampire novel. Regardless of the moral, immoral, or religious underpinnings of her novels, Rice has created and will continue to create a rich tapestry of literary work. Perhaps she puts it best, “Much could be said, and has been said, about all of my works. I would like to say that the one thing which unites them is the theme of the moral and spiritual quest. A second theme, key to most of them, is the quest of the outcast for a context of meaning, whether that outcast is an 18th century castrato opera singer, or a young boy of mixed blood coming of age in antebellum New Orleans, or a person forced into a monstrous predatory existence like the young vampire Lestat. For me, these themes are inherently significant and noble themes. They are worthy of exploration. They are evocative. They can and do reflect the deepest questions that humans face.”