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| Anne Rice (photo: Michael Lionstar) |
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Anne Rice, "whose lush, bestselling gothic tales, including Interview with the Vampire, reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes," died December 11, the Associated Press reported. She was 80. "As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions," her son, author Christopher Rice, posted on her Facebook page and his Twitter page. "In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage."
Published in 1976, Interview with a Vampire was her first book with Knopf. "Anne was a fierce storyteller who wrote large, lived quietly, and imagined worlds on a grand scale," said Victoria Wilson, Rice's longtime--and only--editor at Knopf. "She summoned the feelings of an age long before we knew what they were. As a writer, she was decades ahead of her time. As a longtime friend, she loved and was beloved by everyone who worked with her at this house. The world will miss her and continue to know her again and again through the lives she imagined."
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 Christoper Rice, will be published in February 2022.
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--took Interview with the Vampire as an allegory for homosexuality--to the supernatural genre."
"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."
Though Rice had initially struggled to get it published, Interview with the Vampire "was a massive hit, particularly in paperback," the AP wrote, adding, "She didn't immediately extend the story, following it up with a pair of historical novels and three erotic novels penned under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure. But 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." She also used the pen name Anne Rampling for Exit to Eden (1985) and Belinda (1986). Her series Lives of the Mayfair Witches began in 1990 with The Witching Hour.
Horror author Ramsey Campbell told the Guardian that Rice wrote "in the great tradition of the gothic, both thematically and in her prose.... I would argue it's a specifically female lineage that stretches from the classical gothics but in particular from Mary Shelley, in its humanization of the monster and the way it accords him a thoroughly literate voice."
Sarah Pinborough, author of Behind Her Eyes, praised how Rice had transformed the genre: "I have had a fascination with vampires since early childhood, and when I found Rice's work, I absolutely loved how she took that genre and created such a vivid world and characters within it and, more importantly, made them feel so contemporary and relevant."