Forbes once called her “The Warren Buffett of vampires,” but American author, Anne
Rice has established herself as the literary queen of monsters of ALL kinds over her four-and-a-half
decade career.
Besides her 15 novels of the world-famous Vampire Chronicles series, she’s also written
21 other books featuring all your favorite dark, supernatural, and undead beings: witches,
ghosts, mummies, werewolves, aliens, demons, angels, Jesus.
But the works of Anne rice aren't just light, pulpy fun monster books--her vampires changed
the landscape of genre fiction as we know it.
Rice calls her novels “gothic epics.”
Her groundbreaking genre-blending style combines literary fundamentals with dark supernatural
elements and fantasy tropes.
Some are sweeping historical epics or ancestral family sagas, while others lean much towards
the action/adventure category.
The prose can go from exceedingly indulgently purple to short and choppy noir style, sometimes
even in the same book.
In 1968, Anne Rice penned a short story about a vampire… wait for it... being interviewed,
but she wasn’t having much luck establishing a literary career.
As she pursued a masters’ degree in creative writing, she found herself frustrated with
the repeated advice from her mentors that if she ever wanted to be successful, she needed
to write “serious” literature about typical middle class people in everyday life.
Said Rice: “Anything other than stories of ordinary people was considered "fantasy,"
or science fiction or perhaps "romance" and decidedly of lesser value […] Such genre
fiction could not hope to be "mainstream.”
Despite this discouragement, Rice kept being drawn to the supernatural and monsters.
But she didn’t find her calling until she tied those monsters in with her own personal
tragedies.
While grieving for the death of her 5 year old daughter to leukemia in 1972, Rice sank
herself into her writing, and she revisited that old short story about the vampire.
She added in a tragic little girl vampire character and finished her first novel, 1976’s
Interview With the Vampire--the life story of the melancholy, reluctant vampire, Louis
and his extremely gay vampire family.
But the journey to publishing was a struggle because the book didn’t fit into any established
genre--It was a fantasy, but ALSO “serious.”
Its prose and style read like literary fiction, yet it featured supernatural characters and
events.
It’s perhaps because of that that Interview ended up being a literary sensation that shocked
publishers.
She followed up Interview with two historical novels that had absolutely no supernatural
elements at all ….And found out the hard way that historical fiction was looked down
upon by all those “serious” snobs just as much as fantasy and romance.
So she decided that if she was going to be pigeonholed, she might as well follow her
passion.
She spent some time writing erotica under pseudonyms--some supernatural, some not, and
through that found the bravery to go back to writing about the dark themes she had always
been drawn to with vampires. ...and witches and ghosts and mummies and aliens and werewolves…
and Jesus.
In 1985, The Vampire Lestat was released.
A sequel to Interview with the Vampire, it tells the life story of Lestat, a major supporting
character from Interview, who thenceforth took over as the series’ hero.
“Hero?”
Hero-ish.
This time, the critical reaction was much more positive, and the Vampire Chronicles
was born!
And continues to thrive--The fifteenth book in the series, Blood Communion: A Tale of
Prince Lestat, just came out in 2018.
Says Rice.
"On vampires, they are the most powerful metaphor for the outsider I ever encountered.”
As her books became worldwide bestsellers, the outcasts Anne Rice wrote about resonated
widely with audiences who saw themselves depicted in the characters despite their supernatural
natures.
Or maybe--because of them?
Again, rice: “[Vampires are] great metaphors for us because secretly we ALL feel a bit
like a monster.
We’re all predators in our own way.
We’re ALL outcast to some extent.”
And it’s easy to forget in our current vampirescape, which ranges from zombie demons to sparkly
heroes in romances to loving fathers in family films to comic leads in mockumentaries to…
whatever this is, before Anne Rice, vampires were rarely to be sympathized with.
Like all the various kinds of “monsters” in Rice’s books, the vampires feature as
the protagonists, and are sympathetic and complex characters despite being murderous
creatures of the night--these are no “vegetarian vampires.”
And the stories themselves don’t follow the classic human vs monster conflict but
instead are monster vs monster.
Monster WITH FEELINGS vs monster with different feelings, having ideological differences and
conflicts of morality.
Says David Punter and Glennis Byron in their book, The Gothic: “Interview with the Vampire
[...] offers one of the most significant rewritings of the traditional myth since it was established
by Bram Stoker in Dracula.
Shifting the narrative perspective to the vampire himself, [...], the text begins to
dissolve the conventional boundaries between the vampire and the human.”
And says Milly Williamson, in her book, The Lure of the Vampire: “[the vampire] is no
longer predominantly a figure of fear in Western popular culture, but a figure of sympathy.
Thus, rather than a manifestation of our ‘grisly nightmares,’ [...] the vampire today speaks
instead to our undead desires”.
This sympathetic, complex, sensitive, and sexy way Rice wrote vampires was hugely inspirational
for the vampire genre.
Many authors and filmmakers that came after were directly influenced by her specific vampire
mythology and philosophies.
The literary vampire can be used as an allegory for just about every social/sociopolitical
issue you can think of -- After Rice, vampirism became a metaphor for such varied topics as
drug addiction, homosexuality, AIDS, and the general selfishness and narcissism of the
baby boomer generation.
But one of Anne Rice’s biggest recurring themes is the use of the supernatural as an
exploration of Grief.
She started off using writing as catharsis for losing her daughter and processing the
trauma of her alcoholic mother dying when she was a teen, as well as her own general
feelings of alienation from society.
Religion is also a major recurring theme in Rice’s work.
Raised Catholic, Anne Rice became an atheist at the age of 18.
She returned to the Catholic church in 1998 only to reject it again a decade later, and
the characters in her books often reflect her complicated feelings about her own spirituality.
We see the resolute atheist, Lestat, return to religion himself in 2003’s Blood Canticle
when Rice temporarily rejoined the church, but he’s back to his old ways by the next
time he appears in 2014’s Prince Lestat.
The early vampire chronicles especially feature the clash between atheism and spirituality
in the moral approaches the different vampires take to reconcile their dark existences.
They’re all killers, but they’re often super sad and philosophical about it.
Characters with catholic hangups like the original reluctant vampire himself, Louis,
living in guilt and self loathing, butt heads against atheists like Lestat, whose joi de
vivre gives him the strength to bounce back from every tragedy that happens to him.
Says psychology professor and author Katherine Ramsland, “[Louis] is impelled to search
for answers to the ultimate questions of life, and is especially concerned to discover whether
God exists, and if so, if that makes him a child of the devil’.
Another theme that rises throughout Anne Rice’s work is that of the sensitive, lonely monster
seeking connection with others of their kind as a metaphor for the queer experience.
I mean this isn’t me putting on my shipping glasses.
Nina Auerbach makes the important point that “the fraught menage of Louis and Lestat
is a return to vampire beginnings.
Their irritable mutual obsession recovers literary vampires’ lost origin: the homoerotic
bond between [Lord] Byron and Polidori”.
Ah yes, the original 19th century frenemies who gave us the very first literary vampire.
Isn’t it Byronic.
Even though her vampires do not have sexual intercourse, in Interview with the Vampire,
Louis and Lestat are “clearly married to each other” and adopt and raise a daughter
together.
The series also features many other explicitly queer vampires who are attracted to all genders,
both when in seach of a meal and romance.
This pansexual attraction is just something that happens to people when they become vampires,
regardless of their orientations in life: “I think the imagination is bisexual,”
Rice says.
“Once you're 'out of nature,' to use Yeats's phrase, you see all people as beautiful and
you make a bond to people of your own sex as easily as to people of the opposite sex.'
[... ]”
Witches, ghosts, mummies, werewolves, aliens, vampires… so...serious!
And now, besides its popular success continually reaching the NYT Best Sellers lists, Anne
Rice’s work is taught in universities and referenced by academics the world over.
“What a wonderful thing,” she says, “to have lived long enough to see the power of
labels broken, the "rules" of genre thrown to the winds, the bias of high culture ignored
or stood on its head.”
Except she didn’t just live long enough to see it, she was instrumental in making
it happen.
Her relatable and attractive monsters changed the landscape of supernatural literature.
And she accomplished it through sheer shamelessness.
She was bold enough to write her way about her grief, her spiritual struggles, her fascination
with gender, and so much else.
And that vulnerability spoke to people, especially those who felt like outcasts, who felt like
they weren’t allowed to be themselves in the world:
“I had to follow my own eccentric path, creating novels that no one could classify
or explain.
I craved the spectacle of historical setting, and the agony of tragic characters [...] And
if my career proves anything, it is that if a person fervently believes in her own vision,
no matter how eccentric or weird, well, somebody else may believe in it too.”
And with almost 100 million copies of her books sold worldwide, making her one of the
most widely read authors in modern history...
yes, it turns out somebody did.