The Works of Anne Rice

[Deleted]

Here's a Newsweek link to a story about Anne as well as an audio link to listen to her read an excerpt from Christ the Lord, which apparently has been written from the perspective of the 7-year old Jesus.

[Door]

She has gone back to the Catholic church, and said on the Today show that she'll no longer write books about "the Dark Side". Instead, she is putting her effort into writing for Jesus.

That's it, Anne! I give up. You win. You crazy.

[Ripley]

I really ought to get rid of my copies of Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned. I read an interview with her in Entertainment Weekly, and I'm convinced the woman is out of her mind.

[Deleted]

Add her to the list of people I used to adore and now can't stand (see Madonna).
Part of her re-conversion is due to this crackpot minister Howard Storm who supposedly had a near-death experience where he was surrounded by demons. Then he (conveniently) wrote a book about. I heard him interviewed, he is a complete nutcase and really had nothing to say - like he made the story up. The interviewer couldn't even take it and cut the interview short.
Anyway, after she read his book, she became penpals with him and started endorsing his book.

[batmom]

She has gone back to the Catholic church, and said on the Today show that she'll no longer write books about "the Dark Side". Instead, she is putting her effort into writing for Jesus.

I find that bizarre because so much of the "Dark Side" only works as a counterpoint to religion. For examples, vampires are repelled by crosses and holy water, two symbols of religion. They're not mutually exclusive, but rather almost need each other for validation.

Maybe that's just my take on it. As an athiest, I have trouble getting into some of the gothic type stuff because I don't buy the religious angle that you need to have for the stories to resonate.

[GirlyGhoul]

Anne Rice's vampires didn't have problems with crosses or Holy water though. She kind of broke them out of the mold that had been set since Bram Stoker's time. (though she did have it set that they needed coffins to sleep in and had to avoid sunlight and fire).

I always thought she left out the crosses because it was a tiresome cliche in vampire lore- but maybe it was because of her Catholic up-bringing she couldn't have her charaters be so unholy as to shrink from a cross.

[chiqui]

In the books she gets around even the coffin/sun rule. In the later ones especially, it's enough that the vampires can crawl into a dark cellar or bury themselves in the sand, and the more powerful older ones (Mekare and Maharet) can even walk around during daylight with no ill effects. Actually, it was a big point of the books that the vampires had nothing to do with god or being inherently damned at all -- that was something that they took upon themselves. Rice's point of view, in a lot of ways, seemed to be that they were a new species of creature. The confict always happened when they acted counter in ways that they thought they should (as mostly Catholic or Christian beings) act -- embracing their vampirism instead of seeing themselves as damned, irredeemable beings.

As to her going back to the Catholic Church, she never really left it. In interviews for years she's been talking about how much of an influence and inspiration it is on her writing. I don't think she toed the hard Catholic line about a lot of things though... she was more of a liberal Catholic, picking and choosing her beliefs. So I'm surprised she's rejected her former subject matter.

[Door]

Chicqui, I'm as surprised as you are. When I heard her tell Matt Lauer that writing vampire books was writing about the Dark Side, my ears nearly fell off my head. She practically renounced all her previous works! It makes no sense to me, especially since, as GirlyGhoul mentioned, her universe was ambivalent to religion -- nothing particularly blasphemous, IMHO. So what needs renouncing?

[chiqui]

I dunno... the unspoken tenet of most of the books was that the vampires (well, Lestat and his friends) were doing a service to society by preying only on the truly evil, and those who actually wished to die.

Maybe she was denouncing the kiddy porn, incest, and sexually kinky aspects of her books.

[Deleted]

chiqui said:

As to her going back to the Catholic Church, she never really left it. In interviews for years she's been talking about how much of an influence and inspiration it is on her writing. I don't think she toed the hard Catholic line about a lot of things though... she was more of a liberal Catholic, picking and choosing her beliefs. So I'm surprised she's rejected her former subject matter.

It may have influenced her writings, but she did leave the Church.

Rice left the Catholic Church when she was 18. Two years later, she married a devout atheist, an artist named Stan Rice

It's interesting that she has also left New Orleans. I remember bicycling around her houses in the Garden District. She left before Katrina. Maybe too decandent for her now.

She's in a new home – relocating from Louisiana to La Jolla, to an 11,000-square-foot, three-story, $8 million villa that she's named "Paradise West."