Anne Rice, "whose lush, bestselling gothic tales, including Interview with the Vampire, reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes," died December 11 at age 80, the Associated Press reported. Rice wrote more than 30 books over five decades, 13 of which were part of the Vampire Chronicles begun with her 1976 debut. The AP noted that "long before Twilight or True Blood, Rice introduced sumptuous romance, female sexuality and queerness... to the supernatural genre. In 1985, she published The Vampire Lestat, about the Interview with the Vampire character she would continually return to, up to 2018's Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat." Her series Lives of the Mayfair Witches began in 1990 with The Witching Hour.
Rice's many books, including The Queen of the Dammed, Cry to Heaven, The Tale of the Body Thief, Servant of the Bones and Christ the Lord, have sold more than 150 million copies around the world. Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, a novel co-written with her son Christopher Rice, will be published in February 2022. "I wrote novels about people who are shut out life for various reasons," Rice observed in her 2008 memoir, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. "This became a great theme of my novels--how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately, out of human life itself."
