Anne Rice, prolific author of more than 30 novels including Interview With the Vampire, passed away on December 11, 2021, at 80 years old. She was an extremely gifted Gothic novelist who always aimed for a high level of literary merit in her work and, as such, garnered a devoted fanbase who appreciated her thought-provoking, unique and distinctive books.
Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, and though she spent much of her long life in California, she always considered herself a through-and-through product of her birthplace. To those familiar with her vibrant literature, this makes perfect sense; her dramatic, resonant and deeply expressive language seems rooted in the intensity of that endlessly sonorous city.
She earned a Master of Arts Degree in English and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and also held a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. Her debut, Interview With the Vampire, began as a mere short story and expanded into a novel that The Washington Post deemed, “Unrelentingly erotic … sometimes beautiful, and always unforgettable.” It revamped (pardon the pun) the irresistible and universal lore surrounding vampire mythology and repackaged it as a modern page-turner that was simultaneously entertaining and strikingly ambitious.
Immediately catapulted into stardom, Rice honed her craft over decades, showcasing impressive range and literary ambition: two of her novels explored the life of Jesus Christ and took her on a deep-dive into the gospels of the Bible. Compare those to her prismatic and sensuous Sleeping Beauty series (under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure), and you start to get a glimpse of her extraordinary imagination and dedication to her art! Her most recent publication, Blood Communion: a Tale of Prince Lestat, released in 2018, was the latest installment in her popular Vampire Chronicles series.
Interview With the Vampire, that infamous kickoff to her occult-centered series and won a cult following, later received the movie treatment on a scale large enough to cast Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The classic story of author versus Big Hollywood had a happy ending: Rice initially hated the casting of Tom Cruise, but after seeing his performance in the final product, she ended up calling the actor to confess that she was wrong. Additionally, Feast of All Saints, telling the story of free people of color of antebellum New Orleans, became a Showtime miniseries in 2001.
BookTrib was fortunate enough to host Anne Rice and her son, Christopher, for an exclusive interview and Q&A session at Thrillerfest all the way back in 2013. The experience was both a privilege and a joy. We cordially invite you to learn some details about the late author that you can’t find anywhere else. For more of a basic brush-up, you can find out more about Rice and her plethora of intriguing books at her website.
We’ll leave you with a quote from her novel Pandora: “One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.” While the world without Anne Rice will, indeed, be entirely different, she left literature entirely different, too — and for that we are eternally grateful.
