"These things might destroy me. But then again, they might not."
December 12, 2021 6:50 AM Subscribe
Anne Rice Dies at 80 She was the author of more than 30 novels, including 1976's Interview With the Vampire, which was adapted into a 1994 movie starring Kirsten Dunst.
When I first met the woman who would become my wife, she was a huge Anne Rice fan, and for many years afterward, whenever a new book from Rice came out, I would buy it, put in on the bookshelf (or elsewhere in the house) and wait to see how long it would take for Krissy to realize there was a new book there. I got the chance to meet Rice briefly at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books a few years ago, and I thanked her for giving Krissy so much joy over the years. If memory serves correctly, she gave me a hug and told me to give it to my wife. I did. Peace to her on this next journey.
posted by jscalzi at 7:00 AM on December 12, 2021 [107 favorites]
posted by jscalzi at 7:00 AM on December 12, 2021 [107 favorites]
🦇
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:07 AM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:07 AM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
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posted by Pope Guilty at 7:13 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:13 AM on December 12, 2021
She played a massive role in my life, as a spooky kid who found Interview on my mom’s bookshelf when I wasn’t allowed to read anything scary, a queer tween in the 90s grasping for any representation, as a baby goth in New Orleans, as a fanfic writer slapping disclaimers on everything in the early 2000s. She made something magnificent, and changed my world for the better.
posted by a hat out of hell at 7:20 AM on December 12, 2021 [27 favorites]
posted by a hat out of hell at 7:20 AM on December 12, 2021 [27 favorites]
Playing some Concrete Blonde later in her memory.
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posted by valkane at 7:29 AM on December 12, 2021 [11 favorites]
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posted by valkane at 7:29 AM on December 12, 2021 [11 favorites]
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I vividly remember the beat up paperbacks of hers I would check out of the library as a teen, and the slightly musty copies I’d buy of her hardcovers from thrift stores.
posted by lepus at 7:42 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
I vividly remember the beat up paperbacks of hers I would check out of the library as a teen, and the slightly musty copies I’d buy of her hardcovers from thrift stores.
posted by lepus at 7:42 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
I wasn't a huge Anne Rice fan. I read her trashy "Sleeping Beauty" story and "The Witching Hour" (whose "shocking twist" I guessed at the bottom of page two). But she wrote a lot of words and put things in print that I would have kept hidden. She was not an author, she was a writer, and I respect that.
posted by SPrintF at 7:56 AM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by SPrintF at 7:56 AM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
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Anne Rice novels were hugely important to me in 8th/9th grade. In the weirdest ever sort of way, she lead me to a lot of the most influential books/authors of my young life, because a bookstore in my hometown shelved her in a "Southern Gothic" category alongside Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and, when it came out a couple years later, in a weird bit of (mis?) categorization Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." On some fundamental level, these books and writers shaped me as a reader and a writer.
Also, as a someone with lots of personal experience and family ties to NOLA, I liked the way she was able to capture a little of darkly romantic quality that seemed to swirl around me when I was a fourteen year old visiting the city, wandering around my aunt's friend's sticky, half-disastrous house on Dauphine Street in the first swell of summer.
posted by thivaia at 8:11 AM on December 12, 2021 [15 favorites]
Anne Rice novels were hugely important to me in 8th/9th grade. In the weirdest ever sort of way, she lead me to a lot of the most influential books/authors of my young life, because a bookstore in my hometown shelved her in a "Southern Gothic" category alongside Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and, when it came out a couple years later, in a weird bit of (mis?) categorization Donna Tartt's "The Secret History." On some fundamental level, these books and writers shaped me as a reader and a writer.
Also, as a someone with lots of personal experience and family ties to NOLA, I liked the way she was able to capture a little of darkly romantic quality that seemed to swirl around me when I was a fourteen year old visiting the city, wandering around my aunt's friend's sticky, half-disastrous house on Dauphine Street in the first swell of summer.
posted by thivaia at 8:11 AM on December 12, 2021 [15 favorites]
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posted by Halloween Jack at 8:12 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:12 AM on December 12, 2021
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Tucked into my tattered copy of the Witching Hour is a very complex and ridiculous family tree of all those witches and their children. I was utterly fascinated by it for a time in some distant age of my youth. Was not a fan of Lasher and the others that followed. I did enjoy the Vampire books many times through. Sad news.
posted by Glinn at 8:33 AM on December 12, 2021 [5 favorites]
Tucked into my tattered copy of the Witching Hour is a very complex and ridiculous family tree of all those witches and their children. I was utterly fascinated by it for a time in some distant age of my youth. Was not a fan of Lasher and the others that followed. I did enjoy the Vampire books many times through. Sad news.
posted by Glinn at 8:33 AM on December 12, 2021 [5 favorites]
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posted by Ms. Moonlight at 8:34 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 8:34 AM on December 12, 2021
Anne Rice was also a beacon to a young weird girl growing up in the South. I loved her with the passionate intensity that all teenage girls have towards things they love. I stopped buying her books sometime around 2002, I think, and gave away a lot of first edition hard copies of her books when I decamped Atlanta for Canada in 2009. (The oldest was The Tale of the Body Thief, the newest was maybe Memnoch the Devil?)
Anyway, she gave me a lifelong love of New Orleans, another love affair which has never entirely gone out, but it's banked embers now. I was in and out of New Orleans for a handful of years, a decided degenerate that drank too much and thought too much in romantic terms of this choice, and she was part of that decision (Billy Brite too, natch).
I still have the trio of the first three Vampire Chronicles in paperback, two of them bought at a used bookstore when I was 12, and I think I may have shoplifted Queen of the Damned from a mall bookstore. (I shoplifted a lot of books as a kid, not proud of that.) They are literally falling apart. The Scotch tape is old, the rubberbands have stiffened, and they are in pieces. But there is my teenage handwriting on the pages, bracketing passages I loved, doodles and marginalia, and of course, lyrics by the Cure scribbled on title pages and end pages. Regardless, they have traveled with me for over thirty years now. To get rid of them would be a sin, somehow.
I thank her for everything she gave me.
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posted by Kitteh at 8:35 AM on December 12, 2021 [31 favorites]
Anyway, she gave me a lifelong love of New Orleans, another love affair which has never entirely gone out, but it's banked embers now. I was in and out of New Orleans for a handful of years, a decided degenerate that drank too much and thought too much in romantic terms of this choice, and she was part of that decision (Billy Brite too, natch).
I still have the trio of the first three Vampire Chronicles in paperback, two of them bought at a used bookstore when I was 12, and I think I may have shoplifted Queen of the Damned from a mall bookstore. (I shoplifted a lot of books as a kid, not proud of that.) They are literally falling apart. The Scotch tape is old, the rubberbands have stiffened, and they are in pieces. But there is my teenage handwriting on the pages, bracketing passages I loved, doodles and marginalia, and of course, lyrics by the Cure scribbled on title pages and end pages. Regardless, they have traveled with me for over thirty years now. To get rid of them would be a sin, somehow.
I thank her for everything she gave me.
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posted by Kitteh at 8:35 AM on December 12, 2021 [31 favorites]
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She was one of a kind. She modernized a moribund genre with the power of the female gaze and unbridled sexuality. Without her, there wouldn't have been a vast array of books that there are today, some (Poppy Z. Brite) better than others (Stephenie Meyer) of course, but despite market fluctuations, the genre has never died since.
(Her influence on media fandom was similarly outsized, although nil nisi bonum.)
posted by Countess Elena at 8:37 AM on December 12, 2021 [13 favorites]
She was one of a kind. She modernized a moribund genre with the power of the female gaze and unbridled sexuality. Without her, there wouldn't have been a vast array of books that there are today, some (Poppy Z. Brite) better than others (Stephenie Meyer) of course, but despite market fluctuations, the genre has never died since.
(Her influence on media fandom was similarly outsized, although nil nisi bonum.)
posted by Countess Elena at 8:37 AM on December 12, 2021 [13 favorites]
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posted by dbiedny at 8:41 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by dbiedny at 8:41 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
Just about everything she wrote between 1976 and 1990 was truly foundational for me. Her books were some of the first representation I ever encountered back when I was a weird, queer, kinky pre-teen.
VampChron was also my introduction to online fandom back in 1995 (listservs! Geocities webrings! breakin' the laws of copyright for fun and absolutely no profit, we swear!).
Without her books as inspiration, I never would have had the joyful experience of writing two absolutely terrible trunk novels.
I'm going to go revisit my autographed copy of The Vampire Lestat today in her memory. Thanks for everything, Anne.
posted by merriment at 8:47 AM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
VampChron was also my introduction to online fandom back in 1995 (listservs! Geocities webrings! breakin' the laws of copyright for fun and absolutely no profit, we swear!).
Without her books as inspiration, I never would have had the joyful experience of writing two absolutely terrible trunk novels.
I'm going to go revisit my autographed copy of The Vampire Lestat today in her memory. Thanks for everything, Anne.
posted by merriment at 8:47 AM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
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posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 9:06 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by oozy rat in a sanitary zoo at 9:06 AM on December 12, 2021
She was a writer who had a huge cultural impact.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:13 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Dip Flash at 9:13 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
My older brother gave me a paperback copy of Interview With The Vampire when I was about 14. “Read this,” he said darkly, “people say it’s fiction but it’s not. I’ve been to New Orleans and I know.”
I read them all, every blessed thing she ever wrote, although I think I threw Lasher across the room more than once and when she went full metal Jesus I had to walk away. Many many years later when I worked at a used bookstore she had fallen out of favor and there was just not enough shelf room for all the copies of Memnoch and The Body Thief. My younger coworkers used to scoff at her but I would say, no, look, we never have Interview, do we? Read that one and come back and tell me she can’t write.
Of course, it was nonfiction, unlike the rest.
RIP you crazy diamond, you probably changed my brain in some deep and fundamental ways and I would have been the less without you.
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posted by mygothlaundry at 9:21 AM on December 12, 2021 [28 favorites]
I read them all, every blessed thing she ever wrote, although I think I threw Lasher across the room more than once and when she went full metal Jesus I had to walk away. Many many years later when I worked at a used bookstore she had fallen out of favor and there was just not enough shelf room for all the copies of Memnoch and The Body Thief. My younger coworkers used to scoff at her but I would say, no, look, we never have Interview, do we? Read that one and come back and tell me she can’t write.
Of course, it was nonfiction, unlike the rest.
RIP you crazy diamond, you probably changed my brain in some deep and fundamental ways and I would have been the less without you.
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posted by mygothlaundry at 9:21 AM on December 12, 2021 [28 favorites]
I always thought if you viewed The Body Thief as a Star Trek episode, it worked pretty good. Anyway, I enjoyed it.
posted by valkane at 9:27 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by valkane at 9:27 AM on December 12, 2021
Also, I remember when years ago she put that mansion on the market. I would just flip through the website with pictures (I think it was a nunnery or something) and think, "what a cool life built by vampires."
posted by valkane at 9:29 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by valkane at 9:29 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
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posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:47 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:47 AM on December 12, 2021
The first Anne Rice book I read was Lasher. I may not revisit it, but I'm so glad that teenage-me found it. (I bet The Body Thief is still fun.)
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posted by mersen at 9:50 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by mersen at 9:50 AM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
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. Anne Rice, 2010, after she returned to religion. Via The Guardian
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posted by theora55 at 10:01 AM on December 12, 2021 [21 favorites]
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posted by theora55 at 10:01 AM on December 12, 2021 [21 favorites]
Ever since I heard the news about her death, I've been trying to put into words what a strange, meaningful force she was in my life. There are some writers who come to you at exactly the right time of your life, a time when their concerns and yours are so closely aligned, it's like having someone whisper in your ear. And this is what I experienced, reading the October 1985 issue of Twilight Zone magazine on the bus to school.
The magazine itself deserves its own FPP sometime, if it hasn't already had one, for the glorious wave of eerie horror it brought to the world, but that particular issue had an excerpt from The Vampire Lestat, and I was floored. I was changed. I had to find that damned book! Except I was a young teen, living in the south, and there was no internet, no Amazon, and even though we had probably six bookstores in town (not counting the two Christian ones), I couldn't find a copy. Both it, and its predecessor, were entirely unavailable to a kid with my limited resources and knowledge. It was a great source of frustration to me, and one I wouldn't have been able to describe to anyone. How can you need a book? And yet I did.
I was in high school, and at some point after my big book search, I began to volunteer at the library. And what did I find, in the back room, on a shelf of books destined for the trash, since they weren't really appropriate for our shelves? A tattered paperback of Interview with the Vampire (if I'm not mistaken, the Ballantine 1981 paperback edition). I asked the librarian if I could have it, since we were tossing it anyway. When I got it home, I devoured it.
We hear the word "representation" today, and we all kind of acknowledge its importance. But I don't think there's a way to describe what it's like, growing up gay in the 1980s, in the south, in Baptist country, with literally nothing to look to to define yourself. The occasional "special episode" of television only made things horribly worse. You were a freak, a monster, one of God's mistakes, and you'd pay for it with an eternity in hellfire. And yet, in this book, there were vampires who gloried in that fate, who basked in the knowledge of their damnation. I'm not going to say, like, I became some brave queer kid because I read a book about vampires. Hell, I'm still not brave. But that book and its sequels helped me position myself in a mental world where not only was it okay to be a big depressed moody queer kid, but where it really seemed like the only reasonable stance to take.
She provided so much of the mental furniture of that time in my life. Because then I got a job at a bookstore, and really understood how to find books, and there was no stopping me. I flew through the Sleeping Beauty books (horse-tails, yoinks, what was all this!), through the Ann Rampling stuff (lordy! i blush!), and of course, was the first one to grab a copy of Queen of the Damned thanks to being the one to open the boxes when they arrived at the store. She gave me something to talk about to friends--straight and gay alike, we all found something incredible in her work.
And then...? Well, I don't know. Things change. The problem with something speaking to you so, so strongly at one time in your life, is that if you move on, if you become a different person, sometimes the thing stops speaking to you. I continued to pick up her books for a while, but none of them were as earth-shatteringly important...and then I stopped buying the new ones, and really lost touch with whatever she was up to.
But that's okay, right? That happens. There are very few writers I found absolutely essential to my teens, that I would be reading today in my 50s. But I'm not even sure I would've survived to my 50s, if I hadn't found her back then. If I hadn't had her prose--call it lurid, call it purple, whatever--I wouldn't have been able to unshackle at least some small part of myself from the agony of guilt and torture I carried everywhere with me, the chains wrought by a religious upbringing. She said it was okay to have deep, uncontrollable emotions. To feel like you were an outsider, and that your life was unnaturally constrained.
So, I don't care what anybody says about her. She's a saint, in my book. I hope she enjoys whatever afterlife is reserved for people who help queer goth kids survive the harsh constricted world of the living.
posted by mittens at 10:21 AM on December 12, 2021 [102 favorites]
The magazine itself deserves its own FPP sometime, if it hasn't already had one, for the glorious wave of eerie horror it brought to the world, but that particular issue had an excerpt from The Vampire Lestat, and I was floored. I was changed. I had to find that damned book! Except I was a young teen, living in the south, and there was no internet, no Amazon, and even though we had probably six bookstores in town (not counting the two Christian ones), I couldn't find a copy. Both it, and its predecessor, were entirely unavailable to a kid with my limited resources and knowledge. It was a great source of frustration to me, and one I wouldn't have been able to describe to anyone. How can you need a book? And yet I did.
I was in high school, and at some point after my big book search, I began to volunteer at the library. And what did I find, in the back room, on a shelf of books destined for the trash, since they weren't really appropriate for our shelves? A tattered paperback of Interview with the Vampire (if I'm not mistaken, the Ballantine 1981 paperback edition). I asked the librarian if I could have it, since we were tossing it anyway. When I got it home, I devoured it.
We hear the word "representation" today, and we all kind of acknowledge its importance. But I don't think there's a way to describe what it's like, growing up gay in the 1980s, in the south, in Baptist country, with literally nothing to look to to define yourself. The occasional "special episode" of television only made things horribly worse. You were a freak, a monster, one of God's mistakes, and you'd pay for it with an eternity in hellfire. And yet, in this book, there were vampires who gloried in that fate, who basked in the knowledge of their damnation. I'm not going to say, like, I became some brave queer kid because I read a book about vampires. Hell, I'm still not brave. But that book and its sequels helped me position myself in a mental world where not only was it okay to be a big depressed moody queer kid, but where it really seemed like the only reasonable stance to take.
She provided so much of the mental furniture of that time in my life. Because then I got a job at a bookstore, and really understood how to find books, and there was no stopping me. I flew through the Sleeping Beauty books (horse-tails, yoinks, what was all this!), through the Ann Rampling stuff (lordy! i blush!), and of course, was the first one to grab a copy of Queen of the Damned thanks to being the one to open the boxes when they arrived at the store. She gave me something to talk about to friends--straight and gay alike, we all found something incredible in her work.
And then...? Well, I don't know. Things change. The problem with something speaking to you so, so strongly at one time in your life, is that if you move on, if you become a different person, sometimes the thing stops speaking to you. I continued to pick up her books for a while, but none of them were as earth-shatteringly important...and then I stopped buying the new ones, and really lost touch with whatever she was up to.
But that's okay, right? That happens. There are very few writers I found absolutely essential to my teens, that I would be reading today in my 50s. But I'm not even sure I would've survived to my 50s, if I hadn't found her back then. If I hadn't had her prose--call it lurid, call it purple, whatever--I wouldn't have been able to unshackle at least some small part of myself from the agony of guilt and torture I carried everywhere with me, the chains wrought by a religious upbringing. She said it was okay to have deep, uncontrollable emotions. To feel like you were an outsider, and that your life was unnaturally constrained.
So, I don't care what anybody says about her. She's a saint, in my book. I hope she enjoys whatever afterlife is reserved for people who help queer goth kids survive the harsh constricted world of the living.
posted by mittens at 10:21 AM on December 12, 2021 [102 favorites]
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posted by dannyboybell at 10:37 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by dannyboybell at 10:37 AM on December 12, 2021
She gave me something to talk about to friends--straight and gay alike, we all found something incredible in her work.
I really appreciated your comment, and it made me remember how incredibly important her books were to people I knew in the 80's. I read the books and enjoyed them, but many of my friends found representation or connection at a deep level in her books. I don't know how you could measure that kind of impact, but it has to have been huge.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:41 AM on December 12, 2021 [6 favorites]
I really appreciated your comment, and it made me remember how incredibly important her books were to people I knew in the 80's. I read the books and enjoyed them, but many of my friends found representation or connection at a deep level in her books. I don't know how you could measure that kind of impact, but it has to have been huge.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:41 AM on December 12, 2021 [6 favorites]
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posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 10:42 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 10:42 AM on December 12, 2021
Like so many others here, her writings were so much a part of my younger life. Even thought I, too, wandered away from her worlds about halfway through each series, I cannot emphasize enough how unique and fantastic and meaningful her work is to so many people. I'm a little protective of her as I would be a talented, eccentric aunt.
Her first website, Kith & Kin, is one of the first official celebrity websites that I remember finding and I would visit it obsessively for updates.
Between Nez & Anne Rice, my kitchy childhood/young adulthood passions are taking a beating this week.
posted by kimberussell at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
Her first website, Kith & Kin, is one of the first official celebrity websites that I remember finding and I would visit it obsessively for updates.
Between Nez & Anne Rice, my kitchy childhood/young adulthood passions are taking a beating this week.
posted by kimberussell at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
Her early books were a great comfort to me at a very troubled time of my life, and I'll always be grateful for that. I sang Sting's "Moon Over Bourbon Street," which was inspired by Interview, at my high school Class Night. I fought to get a blue spotlight instead of the pink and amber everyone else was getting. I felt like Marlene Dietrich for one brief, shining moment.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2021 [16 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:46 AM on December 12, 2021 [16 favorites]
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posted by interogative mood at 10:49 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by interogative mood at 10:49 AM on December 12, 2021
I had already lost real interest, but I distinctly recall the moment I went "NOPE! Nope, nope, nope" at her work (when Lasher (?) was reborn as a baby, which now reminds me of this).
Nonetheless, Interview with the Vampire is a real fever-dream of a book, and, while I'm straight, a weirdly powerful vision of an alternative, non-heteronormative form of domesticity for a kid in a bad religious home situation in the early 1980s.
(Speaking of finding her books in the library, I also remember finding the first Beauty book in the Widener (Harvard grad library) stacks, of all places, and sneakily reading it at my desk when I should've been working.)
posted by praemunire at 11:08 AM on December 12, 2021 [11 favorites]
Nonetheless, Interview with the Vampire is a real fever-dream of a book, and, while I'm straight, a weirdly powerful vision of an alternative, non-heteronormative form of domesticity for a kid in a bad religious home situation in the early 1980s.
(Speaking of finding her books in the library, I also remember finding the first Beauty book in the Widener (Harvard grad library) stacks, of all places, and sneakily reading it at my desk when I should've been working.)
posted by praemunire at 11:08 AM on December 12, 2021 [11 favorites]
mittens:
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:30 AM on December 12, 2021 [17 favorites]
And then...? Well, I don't know. Things change. The problem with something speaking to you so, so strongly at one time in your life, is that if you move on, if you become a different person, sometimes the thing stops speaking to you. I continued to pick up her books for a while, but none of them were as earth-shatteringly important...and then I stopped buying the new ones, and really lost touch with whatever she was up to.Flagged as fantastic. There are some things that, at least for some of us, are beyond criticism, because they helped us survive.
But that's okay, right? That happens. There are very few writers I found absolutely essential to my teens, that I would be reading today in my 50s. But I'm not even sure I would've survived to my 50s, if I hadn't found her back then. If I hadn't had her prose--call it lurid, call it purple, whatever--I wouldn't have been able to unshackle at least some small part of myself from the agony of guilt and torture I carried everywhere with me, the chains wrought by a religious upbringing. She said it was okay to have deep, uncontrollable emotions. To feel like you were an outsider, and that your life was unnaturally constrained.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:30 AM on December 12, 2021 [17 favorites]
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posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 11:58 AM on December 12, 2021
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 11:58 AM on December 12, 2021
I discovered Anne Rice after reading reading Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tapes, but I never got around to finding out which came first. Interview with a Vampire was published in 1976, The Dracula Tapes in 1975.
It seems unlikely to me Rice was influenced by Saberhagen, but he was a Catholic, and she was raised Catholic but repudiated Catholicism at 16, though she later returned to the Church. Must have been something in the air back in the mid-70s.
I just kind of assumed Bram Stoker was Catholic too, but he wasn’t, though he was Irish, and his book is replete with Catholic themes.
posted by jamjam at 12:01 PM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
It seems unlikely to me Rice was influenced by Saberhagen, but he was a Catholic, and she was raised Catholic but repudiated Catholicism at 16, though she later returned to the Church. Must have been something in the air back in the mid-70s.
I just kind of assumed Bram Stoker was Catholic too, but he wasn’t, though he was Irish, and his book is replete with Catholic themes.
posted by jamjam at 12:01 PM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
(Speaking of finding her books in the library, I also remember finding the first Beauty book in the Widener (Harvard grad library) stacks, of all places, and sneakily reading it at my desk when I should've been working.)
When I worked at a library, hers were among the books that people would most often hide around the shelves or just plain steal.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:19 PM on December 12, 2021
When I worked at a library, hers were among the books that people would most often hide around the shelves or just plain steal.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:19 PM on December 12, 2021
It was a legitimate library acquisition! Not sure how, in those days.
posted by praemunire at 12:32 PM on December 12, 2021
posted by praemunire at 12:32 PM on December 12, 2021
I read the first four vampire chronicles as a teen for the same reasons I read Stephen King, because they were part of the zeitgeist at that stage of my life, but I didn't particularly enjoy them - I was still finding myself in a genre sense. I picked up Memnoch The Devil as an airport novel (literally) to read in a hemisphere-crossing flight and loved it, though I hear that wasn't a common opinion. Its fictional intertextuality fascinated me in a way the more historical earlier novels hadn't. At the end, When Lestat (temporarily apparently) vanished into legend I felt sated and complete, and never picked up another of hers. I'm grateful for that experience.
That said, she once wrote "I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me." I'm yet to be convinced that's a battle anyone should want to win.
posted by Sparx at 1:10 PM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
That said, she once wrote "I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me." I'm yet to be convinced that's a battle anyone should want to win.
posted by Sparx at 1:10 PM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
I actually first read Rice through her erotica, under the names Roquelaure and Rampling. It was interesting to move from those to Interview with a Vampire.
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posted by doctornemo at 1:22 PM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by doctornemo at 1:22 PM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by feral_goldfish at 2:11 PM on December 12, 2021
posted by feral_goldfish at 2:11 PM on December 12, 2021
The only Anne Rice book I remember reading is The Witching Hour, way back in high school, though I may have read Lasher and one of the vampire novels. I liked that book quite a bit; it was one of those very '90s brick-sized paperbacks that I found in a box of books that someone either left behind when their stint at the US embassy ended, or in a box of books a friend's mom passed along to my mom. (It was in that latter box that I discovered American Psycho.)
After that, most of my interaction with Anne Rice was via cultural osmosis in the form of Vampire: The Masquerade. Until spring break of 2000, maybe 2001, that is, when I went to New Orleans with a couple friends, one of whom was a big Anne Rice fan. She'd heard somewhere that Rice would come out and chat with fans who showed up at her door, so the three of us went to the Garden District and found Anne Rice's (really nice) house. We rang the bell at the gate, and one of her staff answered on the intercom, explaining politely that no, Anne Rice did not really have time to come say hi to everyone who came by. We weren't terribly surprised.
The friend who wasn't the Anne Rice fan, at the end of our brief conversation with the housekeeper (or whatever her proper title was), interjected "Can I have a Coke?" She said sure, and we waited a bit, but no Coke was ever provided. We weren't terribly surprised, but it did seem uncool to offer a Coke and not deliver.
I didn't hold it against Anne Rice, though.
posted by heteronym at 2:56 PM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
After that, most of my interaction with Anne Rice was via cultural osmosis in the form of Vampire: The Masquerade. Until spring break of 2000, maybe 2001, that is, when I went to New Orleans with a couple friends, one of whom was a big Anne Rice fan. She'd heard somewhere that Rice would come out and chat with fans who showed up at her door, so the three of us went to the Garden District and found Anne Rice's (really nice) house. We rang the bell at the gate, and one of her staff answered on the intercom, explaining politely that no, Anne Rice did not really have time to come say hi to everyone who came by. We weren't terribly surprised.
The friend who wasn't the Anne Rice fan, at the end of our brief conversation with the housekeeper (or whatever her proper title was), interjected "Can I have a Coke?" She said sure, and we waited a bit, but no Coke was ever provided. We weren't terribly surprised, but it did seem uncool to offer a Coke and not deliver.
I didn't hold it against Anne Rice, though.
posted by heteronym at 2:56 PM on December 12, 2021 [3 favorites]
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posted by Joey Michaels at 3:16 PM on December 12, 2021
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:16 PM on December 12, 2021
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posted by Token Meme at 4:07 PM on December 12, 2021
posted by Token Meme at 4:07 PM on December 12, 2021
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posted by Faintdreams at 4:20 PM on December 12, 2021
posted by Faintdreams at 4:20 PM on December 12, 2021
I read several of the vampire books and a few others of hers back in the 90s. My then girlfriend was really into Anne Rice, and right now I'm sure she is distraught over this news. I liked the books well enough, but wasn't completely enamored; I was a Stephen King guy. I picked one up a few years ago--I think the first Witching Hour book--and found it hadn't aged well, at least for me. Seemed like a somewhat more highbrow romance novel, but still a romance novel, which is not my thing. But I still feel her works belong on the "I should try these again" pile.
posted by zardoz at 5:33 PM on December 12, 2021
posted by zardoz at 5:33 PM on December 12, 2021
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Brad Pitt, and Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater...
posted by Oyéah at 6:28 PM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Oyéah at 6:28 PM on December 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 6:41 PM on December 12, 2021
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 6:41 PM on December 12, 2021
I will never not be pissed at the casting of Antonio Banderas as Armand. One of the most flagrant cases of miscasting I've ever seen. I like him as an actor, but even Kermit the Frog would have been better for that particular role.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:46 PM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:46 PM on December 12, 2021 [2 favorites]
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posted by SageLeVoid at 7:11 AM on December 13, 2021
posted by SageLeVoid at 7:11 AM on December 13, 2021
I will never not be pissed at the casting of Antonio Banderas as Armand. One of the most flagrant cases of miscasting I've ever seen. I like him as an actor, but even Kermit the Frog would have been better for that particular role.
OMG, for me it was Tom Cruise as Lestat! WTF!! The character was supposed to be modeled after Rutger fucking Hauer, FFS! Have never forgiven that one. Kirsten Dunst was amazing though.
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RIP, Ms. Rice. I loved your books at a certain time in my life. As so many others have said, they opened my eyes and expanded my horizons, and I'll be forever grateful.
posted by widdershins at 7:13 AM on December 13, 2021
OMG, for me it was Tom Cruise as Lestat! WTF!! The character was supposed to be modeled after Rutger fucking Hauer, FFS! Have never forgiven that one. Kirsten Dunst was amazing though.
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RIP, Ms. Rice. I loved your books at a certain time in my life. As so many others have said, they opened my eyes and expanded my horizons, and I'll be forever grateful.
posted by widdershins at 7:13 AM on December 13, 2021
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I never cared much for her vampire stories. My favorite Rice book is "The Witching Hour".
posted by james33 at 7:13 AM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
I never cared much for her vampire stories. My favorite Rice book is "The Witching Hour".
posted by james33 at 7:13 AM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
Interview with a Vampire's Cousin
Also, if someone dies you don't have to weigh in on whether you thought their work mattered or not. You can just sit out the thread!
posted by craniac at 7:28 AM on December 13, 2021 [3 favorites]
Also, if someone dies you don't have to weigh in on whether you thought their work mattered or not. You can just sit out the thread!
posted by craniac at 7:28 AM on December 13, 2021 [3 favorites]
The problem with something speaking to you so, so strongly at one time in your life, is that if you move on, if you become a different person, sometimes the thing stops speaking to you.
There are some things that, at least for some of us, are beyond criticism, because they helped us survive.mittens and Halloween Jack, you have made me cry. I am so grateful to Rice - and I've never read any of her work - for the art she made that served as a beacon to so many people who needed it. And mittens, I don't think I've ever seen that melancholy paradox articulated quite so starkly -- thank you.
posted by brainwane at 7:45 AM on December 13, 2021 [2 favorites]
This is the deepest loss I've ever felt for someone I never met.
There is a chapter in Queen of the Damned I read every year- for over 20 years. It's my favorite piece of fiction.
Her vampire stories defined me in ways that still surprise me. They had more influence over me as a teen than anything else in my life.
I feel so lucky I got to exist in the same time as she did and that I had access to her novels.
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posted by haplesschild at 9:33 AM on December 13, 2021 [5 favorites]
There is a chapter in Queen of the Damned I read every year- for over 20 years. It's my favorite piece of fiction.
Her vampire stories defined me in ways that still surprise me. They had more influence over me as a teen than anything else in my life.
I feel so lucky I got to exist in the same time as she did and that I had access to her novels.
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posted by haplesschild at 9:33 AM on December 13, 2021 [5 favorites]
I've never read an Anne Rice book, but she's infamous in SFF fandom. Fans used to be able to call her home number and listen to long, rambling, frequently updated messages on her answering machine, a kind of blogging before there was blogging. Later she was famous for her hardline stance against Lestat fanfiction and sending cease and desist letters to fans. She also once wrote a letter to the newspaper, as Lestat, to complain about a local restaurant. Just one of those authors that EVERYONE has heard the stories about, even if they've never read a single line of their work. I think the stories of her many "wanky" exploits and idiosyncracies, the force of her personality, gave a lot of people a lot of joy as well.
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posted by subdee at 11:00 AM on December 13, 2021
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posted by subdee at 11:00 AM on December 13, 2021
I like that one review described her prose style as haute purple.
posted by y2karl at 12:02 PM on December 13, 2021
posted by y2karl at 12:02 PM on December 13, 2021
I will stand by The Vampire Lestat until my last breath. It's brilliant and, in parts, beautifully written. I heard a rumour that after its success she refused to work with an editor again, which might explain why the later Vampire books feel to me like pale imitations of the first two. But reading Lestat was mind-blowing, this full alternate history of vampires that stretched to the beginning of human history... I read for hours with my newborn son in my lap, oh it was wonderful.
posted by jokeefe at 12:58 PM on December 13, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by jokeefe at 12:58 PM on December 13, 2021 [5 favorites]
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posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 1:00 PM on December 13, 2021
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 1:00 PM on December 13, 2021
I like that one review described her prose style as haute purple.
That reviewer was clearly interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.
The Vanpire Chronicles trilogy meant a lot to me as a teen and they held up surprisingly well when I reread them as an adult. I’ve alway refused to acknowledge anything past the first three VC, but it did make me happy to see something called Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis because she was obviously following her muse wherever he wanted to go.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:01 PM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
That reviewer was clearly interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.
The Vanpire Chronicles trilogy meant a lot to me as a teen and they held up surprisingly well when I reread them as an adult. I’ve alway refused to acknowledge anything past the first three VC, but it did make me happy to see something called Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis because she was obviously following her muse wherever he wanted to go.
posted by betweenthebars at 1:01 PM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
I read the trilogy during a single week of obsession in my late 20s. While I was in a stuffy graduate creative writing program, reading a bunch of wannabe New Yorker stories. It was delicious.
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posted by Lyme Drop at 1:35 PM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
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posted by Lyme Drop at 1:35 PM on December 13, 2021 [1 favorite]
(Speaking of finding her books in the library, I also remember finding the first Beauty book in the Widener (Harvard grad library) stacks, of all places, and sneakily reading it at my desk when I should've been working.)
It is possible, maybe likely, that you and I have read the same physical copy of that book. What a strange world.
Like many others here, it would be hard for me to overstate how important the Vampire Chronicles trilogy was to my teenage years. It spoke to me in a way that I don’t think I’ve felt about any other book I read before or since.
I re-read them maybe 5 years ago and, truthfully, the feeling hasn’t changed much. It’s a world that feels alive to me, in a personal way, that is entirely incomparable.
For that experience I’ll be forever grateful to Anne Rice (although I do somewhat rue the years I spent trying to emulate her ultraviolet prose).
posted by uncleozzy at 4:58 PM on December 13, 2021 [3 favorites]
It is possible, maybe likely, that you and I have read the same physical copy of that book. What a strange world.
Like many others here, it would be hard for me to overstate how important the Vampire Chronicles trilogy was to my teenage years. It spoke to me in a way that I don’t think I’ve felt about any other book I read before or since.
I re-read them maybe 5 years ago and, truthfully, the feeling hasn’t changed much. It’s a world that feels alive to me, in a personal way, that is entirely incomparable.
For that experience I’ll be forever grateful to Anne Rice (although I do somewhat rue the years I spent trying to emulate her ultraviolet prose).
posted by uncleozzy at 4:58 PM on December 13, 2021 [3 favorites]
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It's been forever since I read Interview. I didn't til university, where I made the goth friends who simply did not exist in my small-town Midwestern childhood.
And I remember parts of it pushing buttons, tugging at deeply-buried feels I would continue to experience but fail to understand for nearly 3 decades, til I recognized that my assigned gender was not my actual one.
But like so many people who start a long distance away from any place of acceptance, it's a journey of multiple paths. One of those is of learning to accept innate loves and likes, of not rejecting what brings you meaning, happiness, peace because other voices have told you it is bad, worthless, stupid.
I am grateful to all of you upthread for reminding me that I still have some shame to unlearn. That I still have some ownership of myself to claim. That there are still parts of myself I have allowed the world to dismiss unfairly.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have book to reread. And if you'll not excuse me, well, that's your problem.
Thanks, Ms Rice for simply reminding me to grab hold of being alive.
Yeah, I know, the irony.
posted by allium cepa at 8:21 PM on December 13, 2021 [6 favorites]
It's been forever since I read Interview. I didn't til university, where I made the goth friends who simply did not exist in my small-town Midwestern childhood.
And I remember parts of it pushing buttons, tugging at deeply-buried feels I would continue to experience but fail to understand for nearly 3 decades, til I recognized that my assigned gender was not my actual one.
But like so many people who start a long distance away from any place of acceptance, it's a journey of multiple paths. One of those is of learning to accept innate loves and likes, of not rejecting what brings you meaning, happiness, peace because other voices have told you it is bad, worthless, stupid.
I am grateful to all of you upthread for reminding me that I still have some shame to unlearn. That I still have some ownership of myself to claim. That there are still parts of myself I have allowed the world to dismiss unfairly.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have book to reread. And if you'll not excuse me, well, that's your problem.
Thanks, Ms Rice for simply reminding me to grab hold of being alive.
Yeah, I know, the irony.
posted by allium cepa at 8:21 PM on December 13, 2021 [6 favorites]
Anne Rice was the first person who made me feel that it was okay to be comfortable in my skin, and that my journey as a transgender woman was special- not because I was by any means odd, weird or different- but that I was worthy of celebrating because my very existence was “A remark on the magic of the complex human condition.”
My Friend, My First LGBTQ Ally, Anne Rice, Has Died
posted by y2karl at 9:17 AM on December 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
My Friend, My First LGBTQ Ally, Anne Rice, Has Died
posted by y2karl at 9:17 AM on December 19, 2021 [2 favorites]
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posted by jquinby at 6:57 AM on December 12, 2021