Anne Rice Went Beyond Vampires

Novelist wrote more than 40 books, covering history and religion as well
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 12, 2021 12:40 PM CST
Anne Rice Wrote About Vampires and Outcasts
Author Anne Rice in her San Diego home in 2005.   (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi, File)

Anne Rice, who built a legion of fans with such novels as Interview With the Vampire but also stretched beyond goth and horror, died Saturday. She was 80. Her son, Christopher, posted a statement saying she had had a stroke, NOLA.com reports. Rice sold more than 150 million books worldwide, starting with her first title in 1976, Interview, which launched her 13-part Vampire Chronicles series. The androgynous vampire Lestat de Lioncourt was the central character in all of them. "I had an idea of Lestat as the man of action, the man who could do things that I couldn't do," she later said, per CNN. Many of her more than 40 books were set in New Orleans, where she was born.

Her debut became a hit movie, but not before Rice objected to the casting. Tom Cruise was too wholesome to play Lestat, she thought. Putting Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview is "like casting Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer," she told the Los Angeles Times. Rice said Lestat had been partly based on her husband, poet Stan Rice, who died in 2002. The film helped renew the genre, per CNN, leading to the Twilight movie series and The Vampire Diaries on TV. Her characters will live on onscreen: A television version of Interview is in the works, per the AP, to run on AMC next year.

Rice also wrote about history and religion. Raised Catholic, she wrestled with spiritual questions herself, announcing in 2010 that she no longer considered herself Christian. "I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control," she said. In her memoir, Rice said: "I wrote novels about people who are shut out of life for various reasons. 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." Her son, who's also an author, posted that "as a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions." (More obituary stories.)

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