Anne Rice: the vampire writer

Anne Rice has been downsizing. At the height of her popularity in the 1990s, when it was estimated one of her numerous gothic novels about vampires and the supernatural was being sold every 24 seconds, and worldwide sales of her books passed the 100 million mark, Rice’s property portfolio was of a scale that few authors could dream of. In New Orleans, the city with which Rice and her work became synonymous, the historic and opulent 19th-century Garden District mansion where she and her family lived has been sold, although to the tourists who flock to see it, it remains 'the Anne Rice House’. The second, almost identical home that Rice owned a mile away has also gone. So too has the sprawling 19th-century deconsecrated Catholic orphanage, St Elizabeth’s, where Rice hosted extravagant Hallowe’en parties with a guest list of hundreds, and kept her vast and rather spooky collection of Victorian dolls, amassed over the years at a cost of more than $1 million. The orphanage is now condominiums. The dolls, too, have been sold; the 47 employees – secretaries, caretakers, drivers – let go. 'It was like Anne Rice Unlimited,’ she says with a smile. 'I was not somebody who was stocking money away in a savings account. Nothing in the world could have stopped me from buying big and beautiful houses, and I loved it. But it was a very, very expensive way to live, and it had to come to an end.’ Rice left New Orleans in 2004, two years after the death of her husband of 41 years, Stan, from a brain tumour, and she has not returned since. Having lived there for 18 years, she says the city has too many painful memories. 'It’s too sad. I don’t want to see it. I mean, it’s not sad. New Orleans is doing fine. But I would be too sad.’ She now lives with her sister in a modest Spanish-style villa in a gated community in Palm Springs, California. She is not comfortable, she says, unless she has hot summer days and lots of sunshine. But the house retains a certain lush, gothic air, with its 19th-century French furniture, its gilt mirrors and crystal chandeliers. A table has been set for tea with fine porcelain and a variety of pastries and cakes. Rice drinks from a can of diet Coke. She is a petite, youthful-looking woman of 70, dressed in black, with a thick fringe of grey hair, perfect teeth and a brisk and forthright manner. She is someone, you sense, who likes an argument. In recent times these arguments have been less to do with her books than with her religious beliefs. Raised as a devout Catholic, for more than 30 years Rice was an equally devout atheist; her books about vampires and demons were gothic fables about lost creatures struggling to find some moral compass in a godless world. When in 1998 she made a very public, and much ballyhooed, return to the Church, it was greeted with bewilderment by her fans and unconfined joy among Christian commentators. David Kuo, a former aide to George Bush and one-time deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, described Rice’s return to the Church as 'a conversion story on the level of Augustine. Anne Rice was a daughter of darkness.’ Vowing to henceforth 'consecrate her work to God and Christ’, she abandoned supernatural fiction, instead turning her energies to writing two volumes on the life of Christ, and an autobiography about her own conversion. But in 2010, in an extraordinary volte-face, Rice posted an announcement to the 550,000 followers on her Facebook page: 'For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.’ She went on, 'I quit. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.’ Rice is about to publish a new book, The Wolf Gift. It is not about Christ. It is about a werewolf. But, being Anne Rice, it is as much an inquiry into theology as a supernatural thriller. The Wolf Gift tells the story of Reuben, a young newspaper reporter, writing a story about a remote house on the northern Californian coast. After a traumatic nocturnal encounter, he finds himself being transformed into a werewolf, or as Rice prefers it, 'wolf man’. Rice says it had never occurred to her to write about werewolves until a television producer friend suggested it. 'He said he had watched a special on werewolves and the genre had never had a definitive novel like Dracula, and that if I ever decided to tackle it he would buy bucketfuls of my novel. I started thinking about it.’ Researching werewolf stories and films, Rice decided to put a different spin on the traditional theme. 'I wanted a suffering hero. One of the things I disliked was the way in which the werewolf simply degenerates into a beast and goes crazy, and there’s no rationale whatsoever to his behaviour. If you watch An American Werewolf in London he just tears people to pieces; he doesn’t even eat them!’ Rice sounds genuinely shocked. 'I thought, what if something else happens? What if someone was conscious through that transformation, and kept their conscience and intelligence, but suddenly had this overwhelming strength and different hormones, and different instincts? What if a soft voice came out of that werewolf which could talk to you – like the Beast in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.’ While Rice approaches the matter of the wolf man’s appetites with considerable relish – there is much tearing of flesh and cracking of bones – far from being a mindless killer, Reuben is rather an avenging angel who preys only upon rapists and murderers, intoxicated by the scent of evil; who in human form likes nothing better than listening to Satie while tossing a mixed leaf salad, and wrestling with questions of good and evil and the existence of God. Put it to Rice that her career as a writer has been one long variation on much the same themes and she readily agrees. 'It’s true. I’ve been obsessed with those things all my life and I can’t really write something without that entering into it.’ Rice was born in New Orleans, the second of four sisters, and grew up in a devoutly Catholic household. Her father, a postal worker, had trained in a seminary until deciding he was not cut out for the priesthood. Two aunts were nuns. 'I didn’t know anybody who wasn’t a Catholic,’ she says. Even as a child, Rice was 'an intellectual Catholic’. The lives of the saints were her childhood reading, and she loved them all: St Francis of Assisi, St Rose of Lima and St Teresa of the Little Flower. 'I very much wanted to be a saint myself. I wanted to be great. I was burning with ambition to be something that mattered, to do something that mattered. Ordinary life was never enough for me. I was never interested in it.’ Her mother was an alcoholic who would alternate between periods of sobriety and month-long benders when she would drink herself into oblivion. 'The thing I remember more than anything is that I was very aware that her life was being destroyed, and that normal life was impossible,’ she says. But Rice’s memories of her are not all painful ones. Her mother was a wonderful storyteller, she says, who made her children believe they could do anything. Her elder sister, Alice, would also become a writer, of fantasy fiction, under the name Alice Borchardt. When Rice was 14, her mother died. Her father remarried, and the family moved to Texas, where Rice spent a year in college before moving on to San Francisco State University, where she studied political science and creative writing. By now, she had abandoned Catholicism, the lives of the saints replaced by the works of Camus and Sartre. 'I came out of that very closed Catholic world and I was suddenly living on a college campus where people were not Catholics, and yet they were not monsters and they were not going to hell.’ At the age of 20, she married Stan Rice, whom she had first met in high school and who was as ardent an atheist as she had been a Catholic. They settled in Berkeley, where Stan taught at university, while Rice struggled to become a writer. San Francisco was where all the cliches of 1960s hippiedom were being busily minted, but Rice wanted nothing to do with what she disdainfully calls 'the Gretchens and the Jennifers’, wearing long dresses and dropping LSD in Golden Gate Park. 'That was just another great big movement of people wanting to lose themselves in conformity. I was the enemy of conformity! I didn’t want to bake bread for people in a commune. I wanted to be a great writer.’ In 1972 their six-year-old daughter, Michelle, died of leukaemia. Sinking into despair, Rice and her husband both started drinking heavily. 'I was nothing and nobody,’ she would later recall, acknowledging that had it not been for the birth of their son, Christopher, in 1978, when she finally quit, it is likely that drinking would have killed her, as it did her mother. In the depths of her grief, Rice dusted off a short story she had written about a vampire stalking the streets of 18th-century New Orleans, and turned it into a full-length novel, adding the character of a little girl with golden curls to whom the hero Lestat gives immortality with a vampire’s kiss. Interview with the Vampire was completed in 1973, but not published until 1976. It went largely unnoticed. Rice persevered, writing historical novels about New Orleans and 18th-century Italian castrati and, under the pseudonym AN Roquelaure ('the cloak’), a series of explicit pornographic fantasies based on the tale of Sleeping Beauty. ('An obsession of youth – or something’, as she lightly dismisses them, that continue to earn her upwards of $50,000 a year in royalties.) It was not until 1985, when she returned to the theme of immortal bloodsuckers with The Vampire Lestat, that Rice broke through to a mass market. The following year, Queen of the Damned, the third book in what became known as 'the Vampire Chronicles’ went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, enabling Rice to return to New Orleans with Stan, who gave up teaching to concentrate on a life as a poet and painter. Rice brought a particularly acute and inquiring intelligence to the gothic genre, eschewing the stock motifs of creaking coffin lids, cloves of garlic and stakes through the heart. Her primary hero, Lestat, was a Byronic figure, bisexual by inclination (although unable to have sex), a creature of refined tastes, with a good eye for art and French furniture, and much given to agonising over questions of guilt and redemption. The novels were fastidiously researched, written in a rich, sensuous prose, and freighted with high seriousness. Rice spoke of her desire 'to have a chance at immortality in young minds’, and of her books being 'meant to be in those backpacks on the Berkeley campus along with Castaneda and Tolstoy and anybody else’. When Interview with the Vampire was published, and it was first suggested to her that she be photographed standing beside a coffin, talking to someone dressed as a vampire, Rice says she was outraged. 'I was so afraid that people wouldn’t respect the novel and would just think it was a piece of junk.’ But she quickly came to see the value of hamming it up. It was her idea to dress in a black gown, and be collected in a glass coffin from the Lafayette cemetery and processed through the streets of New Orleans in a horse-drawn hearse, accompanied by a second line marching band, to a local bookshop. Rice was not merely a success; she became – and remains – a cult. Numbers at her book signings were limited to 1,000, to prevent chronic wrist fatigue; fans would cut off locks of their hair and present them in tiny coffins. The critics may have sneered – she remembers one of the English professors at her old college saying, 'I like Anne far too much to read her books’ – 'but in the end’, she says, 'who cares about that? The kid who comes up to you with the book wrapped in black velvet, and says, “I love this book, it gave me the courage to stay alive…” He gets it. I think what people loved more than anything was the characters. And they followed the philosophy because they loved the characters.’ Rice seemed to command a particularly loyal following among three quite distinct groups. There were the kind of people who wear purple nail varnish and drive spikes through their tongues – what she fondly describes as 'the piercing people’. There were gay men, identifying perhaps with the vampires’ status as romantic outsiders. 'Very big gay audience,’ she concurs. And then there were women readers, drawn to the gothic romanticism and the teasing correspondence between vampirism and sex. 'Oh sure,’ Rice says. 'That’s a big part of it. And I enjoyed writing about that. The character of Louis in Interview with the Vampire talks of sex as being “the very pale shadow of killing”. The vampires didn’t have literal sex in my books. The only time they felt totally fulfilled was when they drank the blood, and they felt this complete connection to the victim; and then that connection was broken and it was very painful to them – but, of course, I was talking about sex, all the time.’ When Interview with the Vampire was turned into a film in 1995 by Neil Jordan, Rice says, surveys suggested that its most faithful audience was teenage girls. 'They really didn’t expect that – the movie is practically girl-less. But teenage girls do love vampires and they feel romantic about them.’ In this respect, Rice can be seen as the progenitor of what is now known as 'supernatural romance’, a genre profitably exploited in the Twilight novels and films of Stephenie Meyer, and Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries and their television adaptation, True Blood. Rice smiles at the suggestion that she might regard these as her bastard offspring. Harris has acknowledged reading Rice’s books, she says, but Meyer claims she has not. Does Rice believe her? She gives a sceptical smile. 'I really don’t know. The vampire concept itself is so rich that it’s no surprise at all that authors would come along and use it in a variety of ways. If I had never written anything, probably somebody else would.’ What distinguishes Rice’s work from her rivals’ is not only their vivid characterisation, but their strong philosophical foundation. 'The books were very much about groping in the darkness, yes.’ She pauses. 'But they were also steeped in grief and steeped in Catholic guilt. Vampires aren’t just atheists. They’re bloodsuckers; they’re beings that have been told they’re damned. And I think all that reflected the guilt that I felt from leaving the Catholic Church. You can think on the surface that you don’t feel guilt – but you do. And it can take years to figure that out.’ Rice says that her decision in 1998 to return to the Church was driven less by a need to assuage guilt than a desire 'to go home again. I did believe in God – I did, and I was tired of denying it,’ she says. 'And I’ve never really changed since that admission of believing in God. If there was a mistake made, it was going back to the Church.’ For a while Rice continued to write supernatural novels, with increasing amounts of what she calls 'religious stuff’ stirred into them. She attended mass regularly and threw herself into theological studies. When she told Stan that she wanted to renew their marriage vows in a church he agreed ('to my complete surprise’) and they were married in the church in New Orleans that she had attended as a child. 'Stan had a great appreciation of traditions; he seemed to respect that for a Catholic this had to be done in a Catholic ceremony, and he went through with the wedding gladly. 'After that, there were many times when he wanted to argue about beliefs – Stan loved to argue; it was a sport for him – but I simply wouldn’t engage. We’d been together 38 years. I knew what he thought about religious belief and I knew there was no point in arguing.’ In 2005 she published Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a novel about the childhood of Jesus, written in the first person and dense with research about Jewish life in the first century AD. It was followed in 2008 by a second instalment, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. In the foreword to the first book Rice dramatically declared that she was 'ready to do violence to my career’, and that from now on she would write only about religious subjects. 'Well, I was ready to do violence to my career,’ she says. 'But to be honest, I didn’t think it would. I thought the Christ the Lord books would do really well – and the first one did; the second, which I thought was the better book, did not.’ If many of her vampire fans fell by the wayside she gathered a new flock among Christians eager to welcome the prodigal daughter’s return. The Christian website Beliefnet sounded a triumphalist note: 'She sold 136 million copies of books that explored the darkest realms of the spiritual world. She dressed all in black. She glorified the night and her atheism. But look at the pictures of her now. See the smile. Look most of all at the sparkle in the eyes – at the light.’ Rice remembers the quote, and rolls her eyes. 'It’s ridiculous,’ she says. 'I’ve always worn black clothes because it’s easier to match them up. But I do remember after reading that I did make a point of wearing bright colours for a while.’ She laughs. 'I tried to look cheerful. But it didn’t work very well. Purple is about the brightest I get.’ Being reminded of David Kuo’s remark comparing her conversion to St Augustine’s occasions an embarrassed shrug. 'I don’t know what to say. I guess I was probably flattered by that. Who wouldn’t want to be compared to Augustine?’ A beat. 'That’s Augustine who thought that unbaptised babies burned in hell for all eternity.’ Talking with Rice one senses that the ardour with which she embraced the Church is now matched only by the vehemence with which she has come to reject it. Having spent 12 years as a practising Catholic, she says she came to a position where she could no longer reconcile herself to what she describes as the iniquities of organised religion. The more she threw herself into studying the teachings of the Church, she says, the less she found herself believing in it. 'I found myself living in and supporting a Church that was demonising homosexuals and demonising women, and making what I considered to be incredible mistakes about reproductive rights.’ One might argue that Rice might have realised this before returning to the Church – not least because her own son, Christopher, a novelist, is gay. In the afterword of Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt Rice describes how at the time of her conversion she was tormented by 'a multitude’ of theological questions and social issues that she found difficult to resolve – not least 'How could I join with fellow believers who thought my gay son was going to Hell?’ 'But at that moment,’ she now says, 'I really felt that it would work out; that I might not agree with all the Church’s teachings but God was in charge and God wasn’t going to make any mistakes. I thought God would know a good gay guy, and a good Muslim, and a good anybody. I really trusted in that. Then I found out later that’s not what the Church believed.’ Equally critical was her growing dismay with the way in which Christian belief in America has been increasingly co-opted by right-wing politics – seemingly becoming, in the words of the writer Leonard Pitts, 'a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party’. The Catholics among whom she had grown up in New Orleans may have been traditionalist in their religious beliefs but they were 'social justice Democrats’ in their political views. 'We were the ones who were supposed to set an example by being moral and loving people, who opened orphanages and hospitals and took care of the sick,’ she says. 'I didn’t have any idea that Catholics in this country were Republicans. That was news to me.’ When, in 2008, Rice endorsed Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination on her website, she was inundated with hostile mail. 'This from Christians who read my books, saying, “How can you endorse an abortionist? She’s a murderer!” I think you discover what your beliefs are under pressure. You find out that you cannot vote to outlaw abortion, and you’re not going to vote for a Republican because a bishop tells you to. I kept maintaining “I’m a liberal Catholic”, but I finally realised how violent it was between the two wings. They didn’t want me.’ Rice leads the way into her study. A huge desk stands in the centre of the room, with two enormous computer screens facing each other, hemmed in by tottering piles of books. More books, mostly titles on theology, history and anthropology, are crammed into the shelves that line three walls. When she is not writing, most of Rice’s time nowadays is spent on internet forums debating Christianity. She sits at her computer and calls up a site where she has recently posted the topic 'How can any human being choose of his or her own free will to go to Hell’, and scrolls down through pages of responses. 'I love these discussions because I can be myself,’ she says. 'And the people I argue with are really helping me in getting farther and farther away from their belief system. I know now a lot better than I did last year what it is that I don’t believe about it.’ She laughs. 'Practically everything.’ There is about Rice something of the small, awkward, intense child still asking difficult questions and trying to make sense of the world. 'I drive my sister insane. I’ll ask things like, “What did Jesus save us from exactly?” She looks at me like, “Anne – you’re a lifelong Catholic; you’re supposed to know the answer.”’ It is significant, perhaps, that the dominant characteristic of her fictional vampires and werewolves should be immortality – a condition that Rice says she would dearly love to attain for herself, not least 'because one of the saddest things about dying is that I won’t be around to find out what happens next. If the Catholic Church really does collapse – which I think would be wonderful – then I won’t be around to see it.’ Then there is the fear of annihilation. 'Because we don’t know what happens.’ When Stan died, she was struck, she says, by 'the simple, selfish’ realisation that he would not be there for her death. 'I was glad I was there for him, but he isn’t going to be there for me. And then I was hit by the horror that he went on without me. We had done everything together for 41 years. A few months after he died, I suddenly woke up one night and thought, my God – he’s gone off into that darkness without me. It was almost as if I saw him disappearing. And the worst fear is that I’ll never see him again. And I’d like to believe I will.’ Faith, she believes, has nothing to do with grace: it’s a rational and emotional decision that you come to. 'There’s a tremendous desire to believe you’re living in a safe universe, and it’s a wonderful feeling when you are able to believe that. I hope it’s true, and I pray every day.’ She thinks on this. 'I’m not the atheist who wrote Interview with the Vampire, this black book, full of despair; I’ll never be that person again. But nor am I that Christian in the first wave of conversion, where everything seems to be perfect and everything’s going to work out for ever. It’s not, and it didn’t.’