Anne Rice 1941-2021

I don’t think it’s flippant to say without Anne Rice’s 1976 best-seller, “Interview with a Vampire”, we would have had the TV shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, it’s spin-off “Angel”, “True Blood”, and the “Twilight” saga books and films would’ve never gotten as popular. She took a once Victorian style Gothic idea about repressed sexuality and transformed it into a highly erotic, still Gothic, but highly original premise and basically reinvented the tales of bloodsucking vampires. Her book, released a year after Stephen King’s “‘Salem’s Lot” in which that author tried to update the legends of vampires, was an immediate hit, but would be nine years before she produced a sequel, “The Vampire Lestat” in 1985. Between 1988 and 2018, she would release 11 more books in what became “The Vampire Chronicles”. She would write the screenplay for the adaptation of “Interview” in 1995, directed by Neil Jordan. While the film was a major success, Warner Bros. stalled on any potential continuation. A sequel would eventually be released in 2002, the standalone “Queen of the Dead” (the third book in the series), but that film more or less bombed at the box-office, despite heighted awareness that star Aaliyah had died in a plane crash several months prior to its release.

Rice would write a few spin-off vampire books, 1998’s “Pandora” and 1999’s “Vittorio the Vampire”, as well as creating “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” with 1990’s “Witching Hour”, 1993’s “Lasher”, and 1994’s “Taltos”. Eventually, the “Mayfair Witches” would be folded on the latter “Vampire Chronicles” books.

Her horror tales would expand with “The Ramses the Damned” series and “The Wolf Gift Chronicles”. She also wrote “Christ the Lord” series, “Songs of Saraphim” series, along with tales of erotica, “Sleeping Beauty”, published under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure, and two other novels, “Exit to Eden” (1985) and “Belinda” (1986) under the pen name of Anne Rampling. Her standalone novels included “The Feast of All Saints”, “Cry to Heaven”, “Servant of the Bones”, and “Violin”.

But her impact on the horror genre, much like Stephen King, should be acknowledged though. Again, she turned the “Dracula” idea on its head, creating creatures of the undead that are “about people who are shut out life for various reasons,” she noted in her 2008 memoir. “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.” It was while grieving her daughter 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 back in 2016. “That was always my impression of what vampires were: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.”

And while her novels were part of that genre, she commanded such power that she got mainstream bookstores to shelve her books in the Fiction/Literature section instead of the horror sub-section. That is quite a feat.

Her passing at age 80 from complications of a stroke is sad for many fans, but her legacy and legend is all but assured. Her son Christopher, a best-selling author himself, is working with the cable network AMC and AMC+ to bring The Vampire Chronicles and The Mayfair Witches to streaming in 2022.