Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic stories, including “Interview with a Vampire,” reimagined the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antagonists, has died. She was 80 years old. Rice died of complications from a stroke late Saturday, his son Christopher Rice announced on his Facebook page and his Twitter page. One writer, Christopher Rice, wrote, “As a writer, he taught me to break through the boundaries of genre and surrender to my obsessive passions.” “In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed, amazed by her achievements and her courage.”
Rice’s 1976 novel “Interview with the Vampire” was later adapted into a 1994 film with a script by Rice, directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It is to be re-adapted into an upcoming TV series on AMC and is set to premiere on AMC+ next year.
“Interview with the Vampire”, in which reporter Daniel Molloy interviewed Louis de Pointe du Lac, was Rice’s first novel, but over the next five decades, he would write more than 30 books and sell more than 150 million copies worldwide. Thirteen of them were part of the “Vampire Chronicles” beginning with the 1976 debut. Long before “Twilight” or “True Blood,” Rice introduced fantastic romance, female sexuality and queerness—many taking “Interview with the Vampire” as a metaphor for homosexuality—to the supernatural genre.
“I wrote novels about people who put life off for a variety of reasons,” Rice wrote in his 2008 memoir “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.” “It became a great theme of my novels – how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of different levels of meaning and, ultimately, out of human life.”
Born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941, she was raised in New Orleans, where many of her novels were set. Her father worked for the postal service but made sculptures and wrote stories on the shore. His older sister, Alice Borchardt, also wrote fantasy and horror fiction. Rice’s mother died when Rice was 15 years old.
Raised in an Irish Catholic family, Rice initially envisioned herself to be a priest (before she realized women were not allowed) or a nun. Rice often wrote about his ups and downs in his spiritual journey. In 2010, she announced she was no longer a Christian, saying “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control.”
“I believed for a long time that differences, quarrels among Christians do not mean much to a person, that you live your life and live out of it. But then I began to realize that this was not an easy thing to do, ” Rice then told the Associated Press. “I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t make this announcement, I would lose my mind.”
Rice married poet Stan Rice, who died in 2002, in 1961. They lived amid Haight-Ashbury’s bohemian scene in 1960s San Francisco, where Rice described himself as “a class” while studying typing and writing at San Francisco State University. Everyone else partyed. Together they had two children: Christopher and Michelle, who died of leukemia in 1972 at the age of 5.
Condoling Mitchell’s death, Rice wrote “Interview with the Vampire”, turning one of his short stories into a book. Rice traces her fascination with vampires to the 1934 film “Dracula’s Daughter,” which she starred in as a young girl. ,
“I’ve never forgotten that movie,” Rice told the Daily Beast in 2016. “It was always my impression of what vampires were: Earthlings with high sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.”
Although Rice initially struggled to publish it, “Interview with a Vampire” was a huge hit, especially in paperback. She did not immediately detail the story, followed by a pair of historical novels and three erotic novels written under the pseudonym Ann Roklor. But in 1985, she published “The Vampire Lestat,” an “interview with a vampire” about the character she would continually return to until 2018’s “Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat.”
In Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles,” some critics only saw cheap sexism. But others – including millions of readers – saw the most consequential interpretation of vampires since Bram Stoker.
“I suggest one reason why the books found a massive audience. They were written by someone whose auditory and visual experiences shaped the prose,” Rice wrote in his memoir. I am a terrible reader. But my mind is filled with these auditory and visual lessons and powered by them, I can write almost five times faster than I can read. ,
Rice’s longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, remembered him as “a fierce storyteller who wrote extensively, lived quietly, and imagined a world at large.”
“She called the emotions of an age long ago, when we knew what they were,” Wilson said in a statement. “As a writer, she was decades ahead of her time.”
His family said the rice would be stopped during a private ceremony at a family mausoleum in New Orleans. A public celebration will also be planned in New Orleans next year. “Rams the Damned: The Reagan of Osiris,” a novel by Rice co-written with her son Christopher, will be published in February.
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