Long before the likes of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, or Twilight became the titles du jour, one novelist was laying the foundation for every sexy vampire tale you know and love, brick by painstaking brick: Anne Rice, the legendary writer of over thirty books, who died this weekend following complications from a stroke. She was 80. Rice was the bestselling author of Interview With the Vampire, a 1976 novel widely considered the most significant work of vampire literature since Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Vampire Chronicles, the thirteen-part series kickstarted by Interview With the Vampire, is one of the most popular and profitable vampire properties of all time; the series writ large has sold upwards of 80 million copies worldwide.
In a post on his mother’s public Facebook page, Rice’s son and frequent co-author, Christopher Rice, wrote, “In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage, awash in memories of a life that took us from the fog-laced hills of the San Francisco Bay Area to the magical streets of New Orleans to the twinkling vistas of Southern California. As she kissed Anne goodbye, her younger sister Karen said, ‘What a ride you took us on, kid.’ I think we can all agree. Let us take comfort in the shared hope that Anne is now experiencing firsthand the glorious answers to many great spiritual and cosmic questions, the quest for which defined her life and career.”
Rice enjoyed a following of passionate fans, who often attended her sold-out readings, as she described, “dripping in velvet and lace, bringing me dead roses wrapped in leather handcuffs.” The New Orleans-based Vampire Lestat Fan Club has been hosting vampire balls for over three decades. But as Rice grew in literary stature, her interests broadened: she branched out to write lush tales of witches, wolves, mummies, Sleeping Beauty, and even Jesus Christ himself. Some of her writing was so steamy that she released those titles under pseudonyms; as Anne Rampling, she wrote contemporary novels about sexual obsession, while as A.N. Roquelaure, she wrote hardcore erotica.
But Rice refused to be sidelined as a writer of mere “genre” fiction. “What matters to me is that people know that my books are serious and that they are meant to make a difference and that they are meant to be literature,” she told The New York Times in 1990. “Whether that’s stupid or pretentious-sounding, I don’t care. They are meant to be in those backpacks on the Berkeley campus, along with Castaneda and Tolstoy and anybody else.” Certainly they meant a lot to a sprawling community of othered outsiders who found sustenance in her work and felt seen by it.
Rice’s passing is a heartbreak to her global following, but her contribution to the literary canon—pulling a genre into the modern era, and leaning unapologetically into what made her weird and wonderful—lives on. Below, we’re remembering some of the most unforgettable moments from her inimitable life.
Rice loved to make an entrance.
She was known to arrive at bookstore events in a horse-drawn hearse, rising from a glass coffin to meet her eager readership (many of whom stood in line for three to four hours just to catch a fleeting moment with the Queen of the Damned herself). In full vampire bride attire, Rice would sign her books in “blood”—AKA, deep red ink.
She had to be won over by Tom Cruise.
Remember that time Rice tried to sink the film adaptation of Interview With the Vampire? We do—we were there, reporting from the frontlines of the battle between outraged Vampire Chronicles fans and Warner Brothers, with Rice lodged in between as gleeful mistress of ceremonies. When Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat de Lioncourt, Rice’s iconically mysterious and mercurial vampire, the author snarked that Cruise was “too short,” his voice “too high,” and that Cruise was no more her Lestat “than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.” Rice egged on the anti-Cruise campaign so aggressively that Interview With the Vampire ended up back on the bestseller list seventeen years after its publication. But in the end, it all worked out: Rice loved Cruise’s performance, and later commented, “I like to believe Tom's Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered. Others may play the role someday, but no one will ever forget Tom's version of it.”
She hated fan-fiction.
Rice’s unusual intimacy with her audience wasn’t always for the best. She was famously disdainful of fan-fiction and went so far as to outright forbid it, writing on her website, “I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” Individual fans who persisted claimed to be targeted by Rice’s lawyers, who allegedly sent threatening emails, attacked the writers’ businesses, and doxxed them before doxxing was A Thing. “The threat of personal harassment is very real,” one such writer revealed. “Anne Rice does not want you writing fan-fiction and she has the money to make you stop.” Rice was also notably incensed by criticism; after Amazon reviewers panned Blood Canticle in 2004, she replied with a 1,200-word screed, including these harsh words: "Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander. You have used the site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies."
Exit to Eden. That's the tweet.
In 1985, under the pen name Anne Rampling, Rice released Exit to Eden, a novel about an island resort where patrons fulfil their wildest sexual fantasies. In 1994, Garry Marshall adapted the novel into a same-titled film, adding a new comedic detective plotline where Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd play police officers pursuing diamond thieves at the resort. We just thought you should know about it.
Her relationship with her own faith was often contentious.
Rice had a complicated relationship with her spirituality. Raised Irish-Catholic, she abandoned her religion for much of her adult life; in 1998, she re-converted, then wrote a memoir about her conversion, Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, as well as the two-part series Christ the Lord, in which she fictionalised the early life of Jesus Christ. You can understand why Rice’s Christian fans were shocked when, in 2010, she publicly parted ways with the church, leaving no facet of it un-scorched. “It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group,” Rice wrote. "For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”
And her imagination still shocks.
In Memnoch the Devil, the fifth instalment of The Vampire Chronicles, Lestat feeds on a used tampon. Let it never be said that Rice had an ordinary imagination.
Adrienne Westenfeld is the Books and Fiction Editor at Esquire, where she oversees books coverage, edits fiction, and curates the Esquire Book Club.
