Anne Rice

Anne Rice (born October 4, 1941, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.—died December 11, 2021, Rancho Mirage, California) was an American author known for her novels about vampires and other supernatural creatures. Her notable books included Interview with a Vampire (1976), which launched the bestselling Vampire Chronicles series.

Early life

Rice was christened Howard Allen O’Brien but hated her first name so much that she changed it to Anne in the first grade. The city of New Orleans, with its elaborate cemeteries and Vodou heritage, was an ideal place to grow up amid a family of imaginative storytelling Irish Catholics. In 1956 her mother died of complications from alcoholism, and before long the teenage Anne disavowed her faith in God.

She finished high school in Texas, attended Texas Woman’s University, married poet Stan Rice when she was 20, and received a B.A. and an M.A. from San Francisco State College. Her daughter Michelle was just five years old when she died of leukemia, a loss that devastated Rice and spurred her to write. In a 1993 TV interview, she said “I wanted to write and write and write, and pour out my emotions, and make stories, and create something.”

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Fantasy Lands

The Vampire Chronicles

Rice wrote her first novel in just five weeks: Interview with the Vampire (1976), which included a Michelle-like child who gains eternal life when she becomes a vampire. Interview was the first of Rice’s best-selling Vampire Chronicles; other books in the series included The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), The Vampire Armand (1998), Merrick (2000), Blood and Gold (2001), Blackwood Farm (2002), Blood Canticle (2003), Prince Lestat (2014), Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016), and Blood Communion (2018). The novels focus largely on the ageless vampire Lestat and a fictitious history of vampires that begins in ancient Egypt.

Rice maintained that vampires are “the perfect metaphor…for the outsider who is in the midst of everything, yet completely cut off.” One of her singular innovations in fantasy fiction was a sympathetic treatment of dysfunctional supernatural characters—flamboyant yet sensitive beings who debated the meaning of life, endured love and loneliness, and underwent moral conflicts (some vampires abhorred killing humans, though they were compelled to drink human blood). Interview with the Vampire was adapted for the big screen in 1994, and a TV series based on the novel debuted in 2022. In addition, the film Queen of the Damned (2002) was inspired by the book series.

Erotic novels and the Mayfair witches

Rice also wrote about real-life outsiders, in two historical novels, The Feast of All Saints (1979; TV movie 2001), about New Orleans’s 19th-century Creoles of colour, and Cry to Heaven (1982), about an 18th-century Venetian castrato. Eroticism distinguished The Sleeping Beauty series—four stories (1983–85 and 2015) published under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure, which some critics classified as “pornography”—and two novels she published as Anne Rampling, Exit to Eden (1985; film 1994) and Belinda (1986).

In 1988 Rice moved back to New Orleans to live in a Victorian mansion that became the setting for three novels about the Mayfair witches—The Witching Hour (1990), Lasher (1993), and Taltos (1994); the books inspired the TV series Mayfair Witches, which began airing in 2023. She also wrote the New Tales of the Vampire series, which featured Pandora (1998) and Vittorio the Vampire (1999), the latter of which Rice described as her vampire answer to Romeo and Juliet.

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Religious works and later books

In the late 1990s Rice returned to Roman Catholicism after spending most of her life as an atheist, and she later began writing books that detailed the life of Jesus Christ. Among these works were Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005) and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (2008). The memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession was published in 2008. The novels Angel Time (2009) and Of Love and Evil: The Songs of the Seraphim (2010) were thrillers about angels. Rice left New Orleans for California in 2005. In 2010 she publicly disavowed Christianity but reiterated her faith in Christ. Rice was active on social media and often engaged her fans in online discussions.

Rice’s other works included the stand-alone novels Servant of the Bones (1996), about a genie named Azriel, and Violin (1997), a ghost story in which music figures prominently. The Wolf Gift Chronicles, which began with The Wolf Gift (2012) and The Wolves of Midwinter (2013), represented a return to her Gothic roots. The novels follow a young werewolf as he becomes accustomed to his newly acquired supernatural abilities and metes out vigilante justice in contemporary northern California.