Anne Rice (1941 - )

Called the "diva of dark forces," by Book's Julia Kamysz Lane, Anne Rice is considered one of the leading practitioners of Gothic writing in today's literature.

She is a bestselling novelist with three dozen books published. Anne Rice crafts novels about the bizarre and the supernatural and is most famous for creating the "Vampire Chronicles" of The Vampire, Lestat."

Her Life:

At the age of fourteen, Rice lost her mother to alcoholism, and soon afterwards the family relocated to Texas.

Anne married her high school sweetheart, Stan Rice, at the age of twenty; and despite their ferocious arguments, they remained devoted to each other until his death in late 2002. "I fell completely in love with Stan, and I'm still completely in love with him," declared Rice. A year after they were married they moved from Texas to San Francisco, where they both attended San Francisco State.

Rice during these years was not considered the creative one in the family; Instead, her husband, Stan, was a poet and painter who later was chairman of San Francisco State's creative writing department. Rice also began to write and ultimately earned a master's degree in creative writing.

Their first child, Michele, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 1970. Several months before t his, however, "I dreamed my daughter, Michele, was dying--that there was something wrong with her blood," Rice recalled in her People interview. Michele died two year later, shortly before her sixth birthday. For a time, Anne was drinking to forget. Then her husband encouraged her to get back to work on her writing. When she did, she picked up a partly finished story about a vampire and Lestat in Interview with a Vampire was born.

She once told how when she told Stan Rice about the 4 years old Claudia, a character Interview that is turned to a vampire, Stan said that the character should be a little older, so she changed the age to 6 years old. Claudia is a direct analogy to Michelle, while the character Lestat is a direct analogy to her own husband Stan, even in its physical aspects.

In 1976 when Interview was published, Paramount Studios offered Anne $ 150,000 for the rights to produce the movie. With the money they earned with the book sales, they traveled Europe, Caribban and North Africa and in 1979, they had a son. Christopher is now also a novelist.

Because of this success, Anne asked Stan Rice to stop working and concentrate only in what he liked to do the most: paint and write poems and so he did. It was a way to recompense the support he gave her when she was writing Interview. In future years when she owned the convent St. Elizabeth, she made a gallery for Stan to hang his paintings - which were never for sale.

Her next book to be published was The Feast of All Saints, and through the 80's she would publish many different books, mainly in the Dark Romantic, Soft Horror style.

Anne's books started a rebirth of vampire stories. She modernized the Vampire legends and made her characters extremely human, with problems: loneliness, lack of purpose, religious confusion, obstacles to overcome, relationship conflicts, etc.

In 1989 she and her family moved back to New Orleans and there Stan Rice and she bought the house of their dreams, an 11,000 square foot neo-classical mansion in 1239 First Street, where also one of her sisters went to live with them.

Success was even greater after the release of the "Interview with the Vampire" movie in 1993, starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas and Kirsten Dunst. The movie is now a cult classic and brought a whole new public to read her books and so become interested in literature. At first she thought that Tom Cruise's acting would ruin the movie, but after she saw the results, she apologized and recently she said that she's very proud of the film.

When the Queen of the Damned novel was turned into a movie in 2001, the producers refused even to have her as a consultant. As a result, the movie was an inferior diluted version of the book, which hardly had anything to do with the book's story.

In the "Interview" movie, the script was written by her, but Queen of the Damned was a film that Anne Rice admitted later that she simply can't like and that she wished that the actor Stuart Townsend had played her Lestat in a more passionate way.

In 2002 Stan Rice was diagnosed with leukemia and died in December of that year. He was 63 years old.

But Anne is a brave woman, and she continues to write.

Visit the Official Anne Rice website for Reviews and News about her new book, Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt

Her Books: All the summaries of the stories are taken from the Official Anne Rice website.

This is the story of Louis, as told in his own words, of his journey through mortal and immortal life. Louis recounts how he became a vampire at the hands of the radiant and sinister Lestat and how he became indoctrinated, unwillingly, into the vampire way of life. His story ebbs and flows through the streets of New Orleans, defining crucial moments such as his discovery of the exquisite lost young child Claudia, wanting not to hurt but to comfort her with the last breaths of humanity he has inside. Yet, he makes Claudia a vampire, trapping her womanly passion, will, and intelligence inside the body of a small child. Louis and Claudia form a seemingly unbreakable alliance and even "settle down" for a while in the opulent French Quarter. Louis remembers Claudia's struggle to understand herself and the hatred they both have for Lestat that sends them halfway across the world to seek others of their kind. Louis and Claudia are desperate to find somewhere they belong, to find others who understand, and someone who knows what and why they are.

Louis and Claudia travel Europe, eventually coming to Paris and the ragingly successful Theatre des Vampires--a theatre of vampires pretending to be mortals pretending to be vampires. Here they meet the magnetic and ethereal Armand, who brings them into a whole society of vampires. But Louis and Claudia find that finding others like themselves provides no easy answers and in fact presents dangers they scarcely imagined.

Set in 1840's New Orleans, this historical novel traces the journey of the community of free people of color who were feared and ignored by whites. Suspended between worlds of blacka nd white, finding stability only int their own community, they live in tension and ambiguity that form their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. The protagonist is a 14 year old boy named Marcel with one white and one free black parent. Together with his sister and two close friends they deal with the transition of adolescence and its mirror in the ambiguity of their social position. Marcel awakens when his idol, a famous novelist and free man of color comes to New Orleans to open a school. Marcel has been promised an education by his rich white father and Marcel intends to make it at Christophe's school. Meanwhile, his sister Marie is being courted by a prosperous and respected friend of Marcel's, but her vulnerability and the plans of other jeopardize her happiness. Marcel is making his own journey to adulthood through relationships with Christophe and his family. When it is announced that Marcel is to learn a trade to support himself instead of finish academic study, Marcel rebels, is removed from school, and wanders seeking the truth about who he is and what he was meant to do.

Following the stories of two men castrated to ensure their perfect soprano voices, Cry to Heaven is a historical novel in 18th century Italy. Guido Maffeo is castrated at age six and enters the conservatory. He becomes a star until he loses his voice. When his voice is gone, he becomes a teacher, searching for a boy who can fulfill his lost dream. He comes to Venice and his life is intertwined with Tonio Treshi. Tonio is the son of nobility and a beautiful singer. He dreams and talks of being a singer, but his family scoffs--that profession is for the castrati, not the son of a nobleman. Tonio's family is complicated. Tonio half-chooses and is half-forced into castration and begins a lifelong plot to take revenge on Carlo. He realizes at Guido's conservatory what has happened to him and refuses to sing. Yet Tonio finds that he now has no place to belong and that his power is building. He returns and begins to sing.

Anne Rice's second book in The Vampire Chronicles follows Lestat through the ages as he conducts his own search for his origins and to find meaning in what has happened to him. Lestat has been asleep for fifty-five years and awakes entranced with the modern world. He becomes a superstar rock musician and millions of fans fall under his spell. Breaking the vampire code of silence, Lestat reveals himself to the world in the hopes that the world's immortals will rise and join together to solve the mystery of their, and his, existence.

Lestat circles Europe searching for his origins. Through his travels and searches, Lestat also makes enemies of vampires who are terrified that his wanderings and searchings will disrupt their coexistence with mortals, or that he will attempt to rule them all. And when Lestat finds the very first vampires, he finds his seminal truths, but also unleashes ancient forces and the wrath of his enemies. Lestat, hunter, has become the hunted.

The rock star Vampire Lestat prepares for a concert in San Francisco, unaware that hundreds of vampires will be among the fans that night and that they are committed to destroying him for risking exposing them all.

The sleep of a group of men and women, vampires and mortals, around the world is disturbed by a mysterious dream of red-haired twins who suffer an unspeakable tragedy. The dreamers, as if pulled, move toward each other, the nightmare becoming clearer the closer they get.

Lestat's journey to a cavern deep beneath a Greek Island on his quest for the origins of the vampire race awakened Akasha, Queen of the Damed and mother of all vampires, from her 6,000 year sleep. Awake and angry, Akasha plans to save mankind from itself by elevating herself and her chosen son/lover to the level of the gods.

An archaeologist has just unearthed the tomb of Ramses II. The door to the tomb is lettered with a curse, the mummy of the king who claimed to be immortal lies shriveled inside. The archaeologist dies and the treasures are shipped to his daughter Julie in England, who finds that the mummy comes to life as a perfect man. Julie grows to love him and introduces him to modern life, including the museums that purport to reconstruct his time. He becomes disturbed and disgusted with the modern portrayal of his beloved Cleopatra. Ramses and Julie, her ex-fiance and his father Elliott in tow, travel to Egypt. There, Ramses is further upset by the tourist flavor given to his ancient civilization. In one of the museums, he recognizes an "unknown" mummified woman as his beloved Cleopatra. One night, he returns with the immortality elixir and raises her from the dead. But Cleopatra is not restored to her beautiful body or mind. She is a horrid monster, a walking corpse of rotting flesh and a disoriented mind that kills without mercy. Ramses abandons her, leaving her to Elliott, not realizing that he too is in peril. All in the party partake of the elixir, with Cleopatra and Ramses in the shadows.

The first in the Mayfair Witches series: The Witching Hour introduces the fictional Mayfair family of New Orleans, generations of male and female witches. This tight-knit and deeply connected family, where a death of one strengthens the others with his/her knowledge. One Mayfair witch per generation is also designated to receive the powers of "the man," known as Lasher. Lasher gives the witches gifts, and protects them. Unsure as to exactly what this spirit is, the Mayfair clan knows him variously as a protector, a god-like figure, and the image of death. Lasher's current witch is Deirdre, who lies catatonic from psycological shock treatments.

Deirdre's daughter, Rowan, has been spirited away from this "evil" and has happily become a neurosurgeon and has an uncanny gift to see the intent behind the facade. Rowan also has a gift few doctors possess--she can heal cells. Yet, though she uses it to save lives, she also fears that she has caused several deaths. She rescues Michael from drowning. Michael then develops some extraordinary powers that compel him to seek New Orleans and to seek Rowan. He finds both, and pulls the tale closer together by meeting people connected to the Mayfair family who now fear Rowan because she is the first Mayfair who can kill without Lasher's help.

Michael dives into learning the history of the Mayfair witches: Deborah, Charlotte, Mary Beth, Stella, Antha, and many others across hundreds of years and three continents. When Michael looks up from his reading, he learns that Rowan has come to New Orleans to attend her mother's funeral. Rowan learns of her family history, her ancestral home in shambles, and Lasher waiting for the next one. Rowan dedicates herself to stopping Lasher's reign. Michael too has his own mission, but it is foggy and unclear to him. But Lasher is seductively powerful and Rowan's gifts offer him the opportunity to achieve his ultimate goal.

Returning to Lestat who is impulsive and careless in the pursuit of what he wants: a serial killer in Southern Florida. Lestat is surrounded by mortals in this tale, and a new worthy counterpoint character to Lestat is introduced, Raglan James. James is a vampire hunter, and a formidable adversary for Lestat. James offers Lestat the opportunity to switch bodies temporarily with a young mortal. Against Louis' advice, Lestat accepts and discovers he hates everything about being human. He also finds that James has disappeared with Lestat's powerful vampire body. Louis refuses to help Lestat become a vampire again, and he turns to another mortal to help him trick James into switching souls, and giving up Lestat's body.

The Talamasca, documenters of paranormal activity, is on the hunt for the newly born Lasher. Mayfair women are dying from hemorrhages and a strange genetic anomaly has been found in Rowan and Michael. Lasher, born from Rowan, is another species altogether and now in the corporeal body, represents an incalcuable threat to the Mayfairs. Rowan and Lasher travel together to Houston and she becomes pregnant with another creature like him, a Taltos. Lasher seeks to reproduce his race in other women, but they cannot withstand it. Rowan escapes and becomes comatose as her fully-grown Taltos daughter is born. The Mayfairs declare all-out war on Lasher and try to nurse Rowan back to heatlth. Michael remains entwined in the Mayfair family and learns how he comes by his strange powers. Michael's ghostly visiting from a long-dead Mayfair reveals the importance of destroying Lasher. In the investigation, Lasher's origins are revealed, the new Taltos Emaleth returns, and the climax of death and life engulfs the family.

The Talamasca is seeking to preserve the nearly extinct Taltos race by bringing together a male and female. Their searching catches the attention of an ancient Taltos named Ashlar entwined with Lasher's identity. Ashlar reveals the taltos mythology and lineage and enlists the help of Michael and Rowan in his battle againsst evil. Ashlar longs to make right the sufferings of his people. To help Ashlar, Michael must keep his coupling with Mona Mayfair a secret, for it has produced a new female Taltos. Rowan attempts to assist him, but the task is difficult given that Morrigan, the Taltos, has been named the heir to the Mayfair fortune. Morrigan becomes the new monster of the Mayfair family

Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic mortal daughter of a drug lord. Dora has moved Lestat like no other mortal ever has, and he cannot get her out of his visions. At the same time, he is increasingly aware that the Devil knows who he is and wants something from him. While torn betwen his vampire world and his passion for Dora, Lestat is sucked in by Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil himself. Memnoch presents Lestat with unimagined opportunities: to witness creation, to visit purgatory, to be treated like a prophet. Lestat faces a choice between the Devil or God. Whom does he believe in? Who does he serve? What are the element of religious belief? Lestat finds himself caught in a whirlpool of the ultimate choice.

From Anne: "As of August, 2000, I can tell you sincerely that Memnoch the Devil is my favorite of the Vampire Chronicles. Have any of you connected Veronica's Veil to Lestat's unusual assault on Dora after his freedom from Memnoch? I am speaking of the folklore of the veil. I am speaking of a blood connection. Of course, Lestat's blood lust is also connected to the blood of Christ in this novel. Much as I love all my books, this is--I repeat--my favorite of the Chronicles."

Here is a a dark and luminous new hero: the powerful, witty, smiling Azriel, Servant of the Bones. He is ghost, demon, angel--in love with the good, in thrall to the evil. He pours out his heart to us, telling us his astonishing story when he finds himself--in our own time, in New York City--a dazed witness to the murder of a young girl called Esther and inexplicably obsessed by the desire to avenge her.

He takes us back to his mortal youth in the magnificent city of Babylon--the gateway to the pagan gods, a wonder of ziggurats, shrines, and ships at anchor from all nations. We see Azriel at twenty--a Jew, educated, rich, beautiful, fiercely devoted to his captive Hebrew tribe, and dedicated to his prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah. In this time of bloody wars and religious upheavals, greedy kings and cunning magicians who vie with rabbis for spiritual domination, Azriel falls victim to a royal plot compounded by his devotion to his Hebrew God--only to be plucked from death by evil priests and sorceresses and transformed into a genii commanded to do their bidding.

Challenging these forces of destruction, marshalling all his strength and wit to defeat them, Azriel embarks on his perilous journey through time--from Babylon's hanging gardens to the Europe of the Black Death to Manhattan in the 1990s--and ultimately to his crucial confrontation with the ambitious and charismatic multibillionaire, the televangelist-terrorist Gregory Belkin, father of the mysteriously murdered Esther--and the twentieth-century embodiment of all that Azriel has struggled against.

Violin is Anne Rice's new ghost novel that moves across the centuries to tell the story of three charismatic figures wrapped in music. A return to the romanticism of her first books, wild, passionate, tormented, operatic, Violin moves from nineteenth-century Vienna to modern New Orleans to Rio de Janiero telling the story of three unforgettable people. The first is an exquisite and vulnerable young woman who dreams of becoming a great musician. The second is a brilliantly talented and dangerously seductive violinist--a ghost--who uses his gifts, and his magic violin, to engage and dominate the emotions of his prey. The third who, in essence, is always present, is the spectre of Beethoven. The dramatic interplay of their ambitions, dreams, and desires are the stuff of an operatic tale full of passion and music. Fortissimo in feeling--a novel in the unique Anne Rice grand manner. Anne is flattered by the above, obviously she did not write this.

David Talbot is a fledgling vampire who has set out to become a chronicler of his fellow Undead. The novel opens in present-day Paris in a crowded cafe, where David meets Pandora. She is two thousand years old, a Child of the Millennia, the first vampire ever made by the great Marius. David persuades her to tell the story of her life. Pandora begins, reluctantly at first and then with increasing passion, to recount her mesmerizing tale, which takes us through the ages, from Imperial Rome to eighteenth-century France to twentieth-century Paris and New Orleans. She carries us back to her mortal girlhood in the world of Caesar Augustus, a world chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. This is where Pandora meets and falls in love with the handsome, charismatic, lighthearted, still-mortal Marius. This is the Rome she is forced to flee in fear of assassination by conspirators plotting to take over the city. And we follow her to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is destined to be reunited with Marius, now immortal and haunted by his vampire nature, who will bestow on her the Dark Gift as they set out on the fraught and fantastic adventure of their two turbulent centuries together.

Anne Rice summons up dazzling worlds to bring us the story of Armand -- eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel. We travel with Armand across the centuries to the Kiev Rus of his boyhood -- a ruined city under Mongol dominion -- and to ancient Constantinople, where Tartar raiders sell him into slavery. And in a magnificent palazzo in the Venice of the Renaissance we see him emotionally and intellectually in thrall to the great vampire Marius, who masquerades among humankind as a mysterious, reclusive painter and who will bestow upon Armand the gift of vampiric blood. As the novel races to its climax, moving through scenes of luxury and elegance, of ambush, fire, and devil worship, to nineteenth-century Paris and today's New Orleans, we see its eternally vulnerable and romantic hero forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures -- a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power. In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the vampire Ursula, the most beautiful of his supernatural enemies. As he sets out in pursuit of vengenace, entering the nightmarish Court of the Ruby Grail, increasingly more enchanted (and confused) by his love for the mysterious Ursula, he finds himself facing demonic adversaries, war and political intrigue. Against a backdrop of the wonders -- both sacred and profane -- and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

At the center is the beautiful, unconquerable witch, Merrick. She is a descendant of the gens de colors libres, a cast derived from the black mistresses of white men, a society of New Orleans octaroons and quadroons, steeped in the lore and ceremony of voodoo, who reign in the shadowy world where the African and the French--the white and the dark--intermingle. Her ancestors are the Great Mayfair Witches, of whom she knows nothing--and from whom she inherits the power and magical knowledge of a Circe. Into this exotic New Orleans realm comes David Talbot, hero, storyteller, adventurer, almost mortal vampire, visitor from another dark realm. It is he who recounts Merrick's haunting tale--a tale that takes us from the New Orleans of the past and present to the jungles of Guatemala, from the Mayan ruins of a century ago to ancient civilizations not yet explored. Anne Rice's richly told novel weaves an irresistible story of two worlds: the witches' world and the vampires' world, where magical powers and otherworldly fascinations are locked together in a dance of seduction, death, and rebirth.

The golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millennia, once mentor to The Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious foe of the Evil Doer, reveals in his own intense yet intimate voice the secrets of his two-thousand-year existence. Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, kidnapped and made a "blood god" by the Druids, Marius becomes the embittered protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the supernatural race resides. We follow him through his heartbreaking abandonment of the vampire Pandora. Through him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine and the horrific sack of the Eternal City itself at the hands of the Visigoths. Moving from Rome to Florence, Venice, and Dresden, and to the English castle of the secret scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel reaches its dramatic finale in our own time, deep in the jungle where Marius, having told his life story, seeks some measure of justice from the oldest vampires in the world.

For the first time, this classic Anne Rice story is told aloud. Turn off the lights, lock the door and listen as Anne Rice lures us once again into the seductive world of vampires with her short story, "The Master Of Rampling Gate".

Welcome to Blackwood Farm: soaring white columns, spacious drawing rooms, bright, sun-drenched gardens, and a dark strip of the dense Sugar Devil Swamp. This is the world of Quinn Blackwood, a brilliant young man haunted since birth by a mysterious doppelganger, "Goblin," a spirit from a dream world that Quinn can't escape and that prevents him from belonging anywhere. When Quinn is made a Vampire, losing all that is rightfully his and gaining an unwanted immortality, his doppelganger becomes even more vampiric and terrifying than Quinn himself. As the novel moves backwards and forwards in time, from Quinn's boyhood on Blackwood Farm to present day New Orleans, from ancient Athens to 19th-century Naples, Quinn seeks out the legendary Vampire Lestat in the hope of freeing himself from the spectre that draws him inexorably back to Sugar Devil Swamp and the explosive secrets it holds.

This begins where Blackwood Farm left off — and tells the story of Lestat’s quest for redemption, goodness, and the love of Rowan Mayfair. Welcome back to Blackwood Farm. Here are all of the brilliantly conceived characters that make up the two worlds of vampires and witches: Mona Mayfair, who’s come to the farm to die and is brought into the realm of the undead; her uncle, Julian Mayfair, guardian of the family, determined to forever torment Lestat for what he has done to Mona; Rowan Mayfair, brilliant neurosurgeon and witch, who finds herself dangerously drawn to the all-powerful Lestat; her husband, Michael Curry, hero of the Mayfair Chronicles, who seeks Lestat’s help with the temporary madness of his wife; Ash Templeton, a 5,000-year-old Taltos who has taken Mona’s child; and Patsy, the country-western singer, who returns to avenge her death at the hands of her son, Quinn Blackwood. Delightfully, at the book’s centre is the Vampire Lestat, once the epitome of evil, now pursuing the transformation set in motion with Memnoch the Devil. He struggles with his vampirism and yearns for goodness, purity and love, as he saves Patsy’s ghost from the dark realm of the Earthbound, uncovers the mystery of the Taltos and unselfishly decides the fate of his beloved Rowan Mayfair.

Having completed the two cycles of legend to which she has devoted her career so far, Anne Rice gives us now her most ambitious and courageous book, a novel about the life of Christ the Lord based on the gospels and on the most respected New Testament scholarship.

The book's power derives from the passion its author brings to the writing, and the way in which she summons up the voice, the presence, the words of Jesus who tells the story.

Anne is writing the screenplay for the movie due out in 2007.

Visit the Official Anne Rice website for Reviews and News about this book.