“I believed for a long time that the differences, the quarrels among Christians didn’t matter a lot for the individual, that you live your life and stay out of it. But then I began to realise that it wasn’t an easy thing to do,” Rice told The Associated Press then. “I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t make this declaration, I was going to lose my mind.”
Rice married the poet Stan Rice, who died in 2002, in 1961. They lived amid the bohemian scene of Haight-Ashbury in 1960s San Francisco where Rice described herself as “a square”, typing away and studying writing at San Francisco State University while everyone else partied. Together they had two children: Christopher and Michelle, who died of leukemia at five in 1972.
It was while grieving Michelle’s death that Rice wrote Interview With the Vampire, turning one of her short stories into a book. Rice traced her fascination with vampires back to the 1934 film, Dracula’s Daughter, which she saw as a young girl.
“I never forgot that film,” Rice told the Daily Beast in 2016. “That was always my impression of what vampires were: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.”
Though Rice had initially struggled to get it published, Interview With a Vampire was a massive hit, particularly in paperback. 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 a Vampire character she would continually return to, up to 2018’s Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat.
In Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, some critics saw only cheap eroticism. But others — including millions of readers — saw the most consequential interpretation of vampires since Bram Stoker.
“Let me suggest one reason why the books found a mass audience. They were written by someone whose auditory and visual experiences shaped the prose,” Rice wrote in her memoir. “I am a terrible reader. But my mind is filled with these auditory and visual lessons and, powered by them, I can write about five times faster than I can read.”
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Rice’s longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, recalled her as “a fierce storyteller who wrote large, lived quietly, and imagined worlds on a grand scale.”
“She summoned the feelings of an age long before we knew what they were,” Wilson said in a statement. “As a writer, she was decades ahead of her time.”
Rice will be interred during a private ceremony at a family mausoleum in New Orleans, her family said. A public celebration will also be planned for next year in New Orleans. Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, a novel Rice wrote with her son Christopher, will be published in February.
AP
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Anne Rice, the author who breathed new life into vampires, dies at 80
Source: Philippines Alive
