I vant to... buy you an enter key.

September 20, 2004 11:29 PM

You're all dummies and you're reading it wrong!Anne Rice's latest book has gotten some crummy reviews on Amazon, and she's seriously POed that the "outrageous stupidity" of the proles allowed to review on the site are tarnishing one of her her editor-free "virtuoso performance(s)." (Scroll down to Anne Obrien Rice- guaranteed real name by Amazon, and feel free to compare this rant to the one on her official website.)
posted by headspace (82 comments total)

"you have strained my Dickensean principles to the max"

I'm gonna have to use that in conversation sometime. Thanks, headspace!
posted by Asparagirl at 12:11 AM on September 21, 2004

Wow, she really does need an editor, if only so she can learn about those new-fangled 'paragraph' thingies.
posted by influx at 12:38 AM on September 21, 2004

want your money back for the book, send it to 1239 First Street, New Orleans, La, 70130. I'm not a coward about my real name or where I live.

Someone told me the other night she no longer lives in LA, moved to Montana or something. Anyone know if that's true?
posted by stbalbach at 12:40 AM on September 21, 2004

Wow. I don't think I've ever seen a writer unload on her readers like that before. Call me crazy, but I don't think calling your readers a bunch of idiots will help anything, sales least of all.

Wow, she really does need an editor, if only so she can learn about those new-fangled 'paragraph' thingies.

If not an editor, at least a spellchecker, at least for things she posts online.
posted by RylandDotNet at 1:01 AM on September 21, 2004

Boy, howdy, she sure is a visionary, sure to end up with her works enshrined forever in the libraries of the future, yet an insightful, driven craftsman, so sadly misunderstood and neglected in our modern times...

/snark
posted by Samizdata at 1:03 AM on September 21, 2004

The book was dedicated to her late husband, and Lestat is reportedly modeled in part on him. The book was probably part of the grieving process to her, possibly intended as a memorial to her late husband, so... She probably regretted posting that almost immediately. If indeed the book does suck, more's the pity.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 1:13 AM on September 21, 2004

And yes, the Chronicles are no more! Thank God!

Well, at least Anne and I can agree on something (assuming that the post hasn't been faked).

And, yes, she recently moved to New Orleans. If you'd like to give her a call, Google has the number.
posted by ed at 1:13 AM on September 21, 2004

I read somewhere recently that what she did was move from that wonderful old neighborhood she lived in to...the suburbs. Which tells you a lot about here state of mind these days.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 1:23 AM on September 21, 2004

She's unreadable. I was once stuck in a Bulgarian train station overnight with one of her books, which was the only English book I found in a local used book shop. I eventually tossed it in the garbage and read train schedules in cyrillic script all night long instead.
posted by zaelic at 1:39 AM on September 21, 2004

That's the process. There are no drafts. There is intensive editing. And that's the way it is. You are not presented with a single sentence that has not been read and re-read, and read again and again.

You are not presented with anything that is not the culmation of what ever I may possess in the way of talent and will.

Mmm. Culmation. Which I presume involves animating dead seals.
posted by chrisgregory at 1:41 AM on September 21, 2004

After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.

Well, that explains a lot. I used to wonder what the hell had happened; I'm one of those who found The Vampire Lestat to be riveting (and even beautifully written in spots) but I haven't been able to read anything she's published after Queen of the Damned.

No one is so good that they don't need an editor, or at least someone trusted with being a second set of eyes...

As for the ranting, I'm wondering if she's dealing with the grief of her husband's recent death.
posted by jokeefe at 1:52 AM on September 21, 2004

i hate ayn rand
posted by Satapher at 1:56 AM on September 21, 2004

i hate ayn rand

Me, too. Thanks for sharing. But this is relevant, how...?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 2:03 AM on September 21, 2004

Thanks headspace!

I am delighted to see Anne Rice make a rant on the Amazon reviews. Online reviews irritate me very often.

I have enjoyed her chronicles a great deal. But I am not terribly critical when I enjoy the subject matter and the notions expressed. Personally, I enjoyed all the chronicles I've read more than I enjoyed Interview. Memnoch was fascinating! Pandora was delightful.

OTH, I tried the Mayfair series and it lost me fast. Not even sure why.

I have Marius and Vitorio sitting on my shelf where they have waited for a year or two. I don't read many novels anymore, mostly because I read so much online. My eyes need rest! But the volumes were so beautiful I bought a second set to give as a gift to the friend who introduced me to the Chronicles.
posted by Goofyy at 2:16 AM on September 21, 2004

interesting stuff, thanks for the post.

if indeed it's really Anne Rice writing that rant, well, it does have a few amazing things in it:

1 - the throwaway reference to waitresses in trailer parks is terribly patronizing. millionaires -- even well-meaning ones -- should abstain from that kind of talk at all cost.
one imagines Rice flying over trailer parks in a shiny black hotair balloon, gloomily throwing croissants -- and copies of her unedited books -- to the unwashed, arthungry masses.

2 - name one "intellectual giant" who regularly reads Rice. who, by the grace of God?

3 - it is on one hand endearing that a millionaire bloockbuster author still manages to be this thin-skinned about her work. but Jesus, she writes about fucking vampires and mummys, for Satan's sake. and with the exception of a true "intellectual giant", a timeless genius like Poe, in the last 200 years that kind of material is hardly conductive to eternal literary fame. she should live with the fact that she's a genre author. and, as genre author, she lacks even Stephen Kings' once genius for dreaming up interesting first and second acts.
want to write about devils? ok. but if you want to act like Dante, then you need to have Dante's talent
posted by matteo at 2:20 AM on September 21, 2004

She's not the first author to review her own book. To do so openly, ok maybe that's a different story. (Lots of astroturf, people.)

Most amusing combination:

==
nowhere in this text are you told that this is the last of the chronicles

v.

And yes, the Chronicles are no more! Thank God!
==

Thank God indeed?
posted by effugas at 2:42 AM on September 21, 2004

Amazon online reviews are seldom helpful and often just rants. Who reads those is the question. ;)
posted by dabitch at 2:44 AM on September 21, 2004

Oh, well. This shows us that even famous writers can succumb to that most dangerous of literary devices: the "submit" button. It seems obvious she wrote this quickly, and in a fit of irritation - I'm willing to cut her a little slack (especially since "backseat writers" get on my nerves a bit too).
posted by taz at 3:47 AM on September 21, 2004

MY eyes! My eyes! IT BURNS. Oh god for some paragraphs.
posted by bonaldi at 3:58 AM on September 21, 2004

Waiting for someone to edit and re-post it on Amazon.
posted by RavinDave at 4:05 AM on September 21, 2004

You can see how hard it is for her to accept the turns her career has taken. Sure, she's sold a lot of books, but I can empathize with her a little bit.

It was never a secret that she was kind of thin-skinned, and someone was going to snap and lash out at the online snipers at some point. I suspect that paragraph is being sent to every similarly-marketed author as a cautionary tale.

I feel for her, a little. But yeah, it wasn't the best move. It's a fine line between brave and crazy.
posted by chicobangs at 4:34 AM on September 21, 2004

How do you mean chicobangs? Did she want to be a big serious literary author but also a goth or what?
posted by bonaldi at 4:47 AM on September 21, 2004

i don't think authors should read what people say about them on amazon ... it doesn't seem like a good idea now ... especially since her description of the book pretty much turned me off on the idea of ever reading it ... and i liked her stuff when it first came out ...
posted by pyramid termite at 5:13 AM on September 21, 2004

OMG! Anne Rice is like my all time favorite director. The Crow rocked!
posted by wfrgms at 5:39 AM on September 21, 2004

Tip o' the pith helmet to headspace.

Ya gotta love the Internet, where you can easily read and compare her rants and look through her readers' complaints. Truly a juicy bit of polemics.
posted by alumshubby at 5:48 AM on September 21, 2004

"We're sorry, but reviews are currently not available for this product. Please check back soon." Heh.
posted by crunchburger at 6:04 AM on September 21, 2004

Never fear. The rant is undead (scroll down).
posted by taz at 6:10 AM on September 21, 2004

I wonder if Amazon has a system that automagically removes the comments after receiving a certain number of hits per hour (on the assumption that someone somewhere is up to no good)? I wouldn't be surprised.
posted by taz at 6:21 AM on September 21, 2004

"And Yo, you dude, the slang police!"
posted by kirkaracha at 6:26 AM on September 21, 2004

one of her her editor-free "virtuoso performance(s)."

Oh. Well that pretty much settles that mystery.

And she would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling internet kids.
posted by Ynoxas at 6:34 AM on September 21, 2004

The whole "I don't do drafts or allow my editor any kind of input" thing is old news in fandom. If you have the time and energy, there are a several posts about it on good old fandom_wank (25 Sept 2003, for example).
posted by Karmakaze at 6:34 AM on September 21, 2004

... as genre author ...

I've always admired genre writers. The good ones often have better craft than "literary" writers. I also identified with them, brought up as I was to admire things blue collared. [....g....]

She could definitely stand to take a page from King here, too, and especially his frequent, spirited, and usually witty defense of genre work. I used to think of him as a Fritz Leiber knockoff artist, but you know, I kind of like the guy...

As for Anne Rice: It's all just necroporn. Yes, some of it was well-written, but the appeal was always prurient, just like her early underage-lesbian-fantasy crap. Makes my skin crawl. I'd have to take a shower every couple of hourse if I were writing the stuff she's written.
posted by lodurr at 6:39 AM on September 21, 2004

... and the sheer outrageous stupidity of many things you've said here that actually touches my proletarian and Democratic soul.

"Don't like my book? Well, then, you must be some kind of Republican."
posted by Johnny Assay at 6:40 AM on September 21, 2004

Tom Clancy's latest novels are an example of what happens when an author gets too big for his britches and starts throwing his weight around, deciding he's too important to need an editor. Some of the repetitions of slang, unexplained bits of technology and flat-out mistakes in his last couple of books are so bad, it's like biting down on a piece of tinfoil. Not allowing and editor any input is not something to brag about.
posted by alumshubby at 6:43 AM on September 21, 2004

"28 of 114 people found the following review helpful"

Oh Anne, will the ignominy never end?
posted by Blue Stone at 6:50 AM on September 21, 2004

She moved to a gated community in the suburbs (of NO) as part of her goal of simplifying her life.
posted by shoepal at 6:51 AM on September 21, 2004

Someone told me the other night she no longer lives in LA, moved to Montana

Perhaps she's raising up a crop of dental floss.
posted by jonmc at 6:51 AM on September 21, 2004

She's convinced of her own perfection. You'd think someone like that would have a more serene attitude toward criticism. I mean, who needs fans when you can just admire yourself all day?
posted by Hypharse at 6:53 AM on September 21, 2004

If Johnny Haiku had reviewed this book, things would've been different.
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:17 AM on September 21, 2004

But this is relevant, how...?

Because Anne should rewrite Atlas Shrugged replacing the Objectivists with Vampires and the second-hamsters with warm-blooded fleshly types. Call it Atlas Bites. Absinthe-drinking, sex-addled libertarian Goths? Come on, pasty nerds everywhere would bow down in adulation!
posted by octobersurprise at 7:21 AM on September 21, 2004

Every word is in perfect place.

I used to tell my college profs the same thing about my papers. They didn't believe me, either.
posted by ChrisTN at 7:22 AM on September 21, 2004

I wasn't aware that people still read her books and now I know why. She's gone around the bend to thinking that she's above her audience and that her "craft" is beyond reproach.

Only thing is that not everyone shares her slightly skewed view.

I've never liked her books and now I don't like her as a person much either.
posted by fenriq at 7:27 AM on September 21, 2004

This whole thing reminds me of the West Wing where Josh discovers the online community devoted to him, LemonLyman.com, and decides to post a reply to a particularly insane participant. Hilarity ensued -- much like this!
posted by delfuego at 7:45 AM on September 21, 2004

... rewrite Atlas Shrugged replacing the Objectivists with Vampires ...

Shit...that's brilliant...but what do you mean "replace"?
posted by lodurr at 7:51 AM on September 21, 2004

>Jesus, she writes about fucking vampires and mummys, for Satan's sake

Exactly. Its like having Weird Al complain that he's not as acclaimed as Jimi Hendrix.
posted by skallas at 8:12 AM on September 21, 2004

I hear her Halloween parties used to be amazing.
posted by muckster at 8:36 AM on September 21, 2004

>>Jesus, she writes about fucking vampires and mummys, for Satan's sake

>Exactly. Its like having Weird Al complain that he's not as acclaimed as Jimi Hendrix.

She would have done better to respond to the criticism of the book, rather than to the critics. She's operating under the assumption that people should read her books just 'cause and not because they're any good.

So having Weird Al complain that he's not as acclaimed is a good analogy, cause you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who likes his music more (for the record, I do ;) )
posted by hoborg at 9:02 AM on September 21, 2004

2 - name one "intellectual giant" who regularly reads Rice. who, by the grace of God?

Cultural Studies professors. But they aren't reading her stuff for fun, they're reading it so that they can write papers on its social history/effect, and also so that when they offer undergraduate courses entitled "Necropolis Now: Vampires, Demons, and the Gothic", with a reading list consisting of Frankenstein, Poe, Dracula, and Interview with a Vampire, plus a couple of movies, the class fills up with eighteen year old goths. There are waiting lists. Their application for tenure jumps another hurdle. Papers are written enthusiastically referring to Memnoch the Devil and a serious philosophical source. Etc. And all is well in academe.
posted by jokeefe at 9:05 AM on September 21, 2004

AS a serious philosophical source

Oy. Sorry. I just recently had to read one of these and I think it broke something in my brain.
posted by jokeefe at 9:07 AM on September 21, 2004

Because Anne should rewrite Atlas Shrugged replacing the Objectivists with Vampires and the second-hamsters with warm-blooded fleshly types.

See also: Terry Goodkind
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 9:10 AM on September 21, 2004

Anyone tempted to leave a review of her book, with a link to this MeFi thread? I would just enjoy knowing the fact that Anne Rice would be whipping herself into a froth reading the comments here.

Maybe Matt could make her a special guest-star member so she could dump another wailing-wordwall paragraph on us.
posted by SpaceCadet at 9:10 AM on September 21, 2004

Seldom do I really answer those who criticize my work. In fact, the entire development of my career has been fueled by my ability to ignore denigrating and trivializing criticism as I realize my dreams and my goals.

My god, that explains so much about her writing right there. I think I've read four or five of her books, mostly on bus trips and there's never been a point where I didn't want to rip them to pieces and treat them to the blue water of the greyhound john.

I guess because I'm not an 'intellectual giant' (though I can spell and use paragraphs) or a 'waitress in a trailer park' (though I can make a good cup of coffee and recommend a pie to go with it) her work isn't really aimed at me, so whatever. If it's any consolation, I've found fans of her work tend to express themselves online in much the same manner as she does. Enormous diarrhea-like paragraphs with no central point and atrocious grammar. So at least she's speaking to the like-minded.

(btw, if you want to read a great vampire book, look for a copy of 'The Vampire Tapestry'. Out of print, but worth it.)
posted by lumpenprole at 9:11 AM on September 21, 2004

I've never gotten more than 10 or so pages into any of Anne Rice's books, but I do hold her responsible for the plague of nitwits in black lipstick who think they're fucking vampires.
posted by jonmc at 9:11 AM on September 21, 2004

"But I leave it to readers to discover how this complex and intricate novel establishes itself within a unique, if not unrivalled series of book." (from her Amazon rant)

Says it all. What an ass.
posted by johnny novak at 9:17 AM on September 21, 2004

There is one novel that I picked up and read almost all the way through, just to be fair to an author I thought I might have been prejudiced against; and then gave up, thirty pages from the end, because I didn't care in the slightest how things would turn out.

Interview with the Vampire.

It should have an advantage over something like "Tom Jones" because it's much shorter than 900 pages and has vampires. But Henry Fielding gets the nod for keeping a reader's interest.
posted by kurumi at 9:42 AM on September 21, 2004

See also: Terry Goodkind

Damn. I thought I had a gimmick.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:44 AM on September 21, 2004

I was an Anne Rice fan at one point. I even braved the flame wars in alt.fan.anne-rice occasionally.

In her earlier books, I found engaging, if overblown, worlds described vividly. Of them, The Mummy, Cry to Heaven and The Witching Hour (notably, all non-Vampire series books) to be the most evocative of them. I stopped caring with Memnoch the Devil, though I read a couple more after that, because they were no longer interesting plots about fascinating characters and places with an undercurrent of philosophy and a dollop of sex. Instead, they were poorly written treatises on philosophy with huge helpings of sex and occasional bit of narrative to bridge between philosophical ramblings.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:07 AM on September 21, 2004

Tom Clancy's latest novels are...

...authored by ghostwriters?
posted by five fresh fish at 10:10 AM on September 21, 2004

Ghost writers in the sky!

But seriously folks. The one accusing her of stealing everything from Cameron and Matrix 3 and somehow getting chupacabras in there was pure gold.
posted by freebird at 10:29 AM on September 21, 2004

I read a bunch of her books years ago. She got harder to read as her writing got worse (aha! no one's editing her! light bulb goes on!), until finally I haven't been able to read anything she's written for the past ten years or so. Too bad, she's got a few good characters, although I can't stand Lestat.

When I was reading the Mayfair trilogy (first book is okay, last two are awful) I kept finding discrepancies between the books (we're talking birthdates, descriptions of characters, and so on). I remember thinking, "Boy, her editor must be on crack not to catch this shit." Heh. Now I know!
posted by Melinika at 10:32 AM on September 21, 2004

Anne Rice reviews the literary canon on Amazon.com: Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Anna Karenina . . . and The Passion of the Christ.
posted by onlyconnect at 10:34 AM on September 21, 2004

Hey, good find onlyconnect: she likes Mary Renault! Can I change my vote?

Anne Rand is the literary giantess you all wish you could be, striding across the hillocks of the countryside of letters, swinging treetrunks of prose theough the staid and puerile imaginings of a generation of creative self-eunichs and stomping out the venile vintage where the grapes of ass are stored.

Rice. Whatever.
posted by freebird at 10:44 AM on September 21, 2004

Anne Rice reviews the literary canon on Amazon.com

5-star reviews for everything!! Very discriminating, this Anne Rice.
posted by Robot Johnny at 10:47 AM on September 21, 2004

Aw, I can't resist:

After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore [typo: check spelling] comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. [sentence fragment; use instead 'I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished AND asked that she accept them as they were.'] She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship [clarify here: 'critical' as in vital, or 'critical' as in you are your own best critic?] with my work and my intense evolutionary work [What exactly does this mean?] on every sentence in the work [repetitive, using 'work' twice in one sentence], my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. ['Offered' in isolation? Surely you mean 'completed in isolation' or 'composed in isolation'?] So [delete 'So'] all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.

My rates are quite reasonable, Anne; you can email me texts which will be cleaned up bright and sparkly and then emailed right back. Drop me a line, and we'll discuss it, mmmkay?
posted by jokeefe at 11:08 AM on September 21, 2004

Not allowing and editor any input is not something to brag about.

TOUCHE!
posted by glenwood at 12:18 PM on September 21, 2004

A+++++ jokeefe is great editor will read again.
posted by dabitch at 1:09 PM on September 21, 2004

I was in Mexico in 1988 when I traded another traveller for Interview with the Vampire. Mexico was the perfect place to be introduced to Rice's stuff. I had never heard of her.

All books following that one have been potboilers, IMO. I read the first three and tired of the whole thing.
posted by Danf at 1:28 PM on September 21, 2004

Reading her reviews of other stuff is just f'in hilarious. She's totally delusional! From her review of that big Passion movie:

The violence is not a legitimate issue. Prime Time television with it crime show obsessions centered on killing children is so much more truly violent as to make public discussions of the cruelty in the Passion of the Christ ridiculous.

Why that's incoherent ranting at the time cube level.

I'm starting to thing she won her arguments with her authors because they didn't want to drag their asses through another volume of her unrestrained madness.

Is it possible that every chapter of each book was written as one long paragraph? Won't somebody thing of the editors!
posted by lumpenprole at 1:41 PM on September 21, 2004

were written by me in this pure fashion

"Pure" as in Mayhew's Pure Finder?
posted by raygirvan at 2:47 PM on September 21, 2004

Man, time cube just keeps getting better.
posted by COBRA! at 2:55 PM on September 21, 2004

I'm happy that she doesn't do the editor thing, and that she's also human enough to be thin skinned about the things she writes. It somehow seems more ... artistic. I'm guessing that she's no longer writing for anyone other than herself, and I quite like that.

Plus, from what I can gather, her books are popular, and it's prety elitist to slag her off because she doesn't press the correct Intellectual Metafilter buttons.

If you don't like her work, then that's fine. If you don't like the fact that she feels comfortable enough to let off some steam on the internet, then shame on you. I hope that the next time somebody slags off something you've written, you do the "sensible celebrity" thing, and keep your opinions to yourself.
posted by seanyboy at 3:22 PM on September 21, 2004

I hope that the next time somebody slags off something you've written, you do the "sensible celebrity" thing, and keep your opinions to yourself.

ok.
posted by jimmy at 3:33 PM on September 21, 2004

Thanks, seanyboy. That's the comment I kept trying to write, but couldn't word effectively.
posted by Zosia Blue at 3:55 PM on September 21, 2004

On the other hand, for her next project, she could always write the nearly due 'Simpsons 2004 Halloween' episode. Monty Burns as The Vampire Lestat.
posted by apocalypse miaow at 4:06 PM on September 21, 2004

I was feeling the same thing, so, yeah, thanks seanyboy.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 4:06 PM on September 21, 2004

Thanks a lot seanyboy. Now I'm feeling all guilty and stuff.

It's not the blowing off steam on amazon that bothers me, it's her overweening belief in the importance and greater artistic value of her work. As far as I can see, this belief is directly related to the decline in general quality, the wordiness, and the jejune philosophical discussion which pretty much made it impossible for me to keep reading her work.

I remember a review in the Village Voice at one point which urged her to take a couple of years and write a real book, and I agree. I've already said that I thought parts of Lestat were fantastically well written. It's been the downfall of more than one writer to feel that they were superior to the feedback a good editor can provide. Even Alice Munro has an editor, you know?
posted by jokeefe at 4:28 PM on September 21, 2004

That comment on Amazon can't possibly be real. It gets to the point far too quickly.
posted by krisjohn at 6:53 PM on September 21, 2004

Update: Someone did paragraph her screed (look for T. Craig, "Just trying to be helpful").

What was bizarre to me was the fact that she WAS her narrator, so she took any and all criticism of the story as a personal insult. Where is the distinction between author and narrator?

Not willing to have an editor anymore = time to stop publishing your work.
posted by somethingotherthan at 8:04 PM on September 21, 2004

I liked Interview, and I really liked Queen. Other than that, I never really got into her stuff. I've always liked popcorn books, just like I like popcorn movies. Sometimes it's fun to read something silly. However, she really shouldn't have gotten rid of her editor.
posted by stoneegg21 at 8:05 PM on September 21, 2004

I met Anne Rice in high school when I went to get my copy of The Witching Hour signed. I haven't liked everything she's written, but some of it is pretty good, and usually alright as genre fiction. Sometimes she does seem hissy and/or eccentric, but she was very sweet to me on that day. I say, go her. She's doing her thing and she's not hurting anyone.
posted by halonine at 12:53 AM on September 22, 2004

Just commenting to add this news story about the whole shebang.
posted by headspace at 8:35 AM on September 22, 2004

I love genre fiction, though I go in more for hard-boiled crime novels than the gothy stuff (just not my thing), but I still suspect that Anne Rice isn't a very good writer. (Disclosure: The only thing I've read of Anne Rice's is part of one of the Sleeping Beauty novels, and I couldn't even get through that.)

That said, I don't care how many people have read her books, having that high an opinion of oneself is not the best thing for a writer.

Also, that crack about waitresses in trailer parks? And the whole "who in the world are you?" (as in "who are you little amazon-reviewing masses to not like my book?") line. Showing definite symptoms of asshole-itis.
posted by SoftRain at 6:16 AM on September 23, 2004