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Anne Rice The Dark Wing of Night
By Trish Teves

"The vampires are always there. They never leave me."

Anne Rice fans were shocked by the news. The Queen of Goth was burying vampires forever and claiming to be converted back to the faith of her childhood.  Not being an avid reader of Goth fiction, I was not familiar with her work, with the exception of Interview with a Vampire.

Upon getting news of the opportunity to talk with her, I immediately felt dread. About what?  I do not know. Maybe it was the vampires. Maybe it was the fact that I actually had to meet the Madame Du Underworld, or maybe it was simply that I am scared of anything that oozes blood. And isn't that what she is all about?

Inching up the hill to her house, I was tingling with anxiety. What would she be like? Would her house be filled with coffins and fake teeth? Once arriving, I half expected Rice to float down the staircase, black cape flowing behind her, with an oversized crucifix around her neck.

After waiting for what seemed like a bite of eternity, Rice tiptoed up behind me almost unnoticed. Standing just less than 5 feet tall, hair perfectly groomed in a modern bob, wearing black.and white. She was nothing like I imagined her to be.

A diva of duality, Rice refers to her past work as a search for redemption and truth. Rice spoke of her obsession with vampires, which turned into an obsession with another, wilder subject, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It is her most ambitious and courageous project yet.

Now her profession has turned into a calling. She seems to be in love with the One who answered the question of redemption she posed in The Vampire Chronicles.

Now the woman that returned back to faith after 30 years of being an atheist has only one question to ask: Will they take me back?

 

What were you like as a child?

I was very talkative and extroverted. I was a very slow reader. I didn't read for pleasure because it was so hard for me. I wasn't a very good student and had poor concentration.

 But, I wrote very early. I wrote short stories for fun and passed them around class. My older sister Alice was a big fan of my writing and she always laughed at my jokes. She was one of the main reasons I continued to write.

 

How does a young Catholic girl go from writing humorous short stories for friends to the dark world of vampires?

I didn't write Interview With a Vampire until I was 34. I was at Berkeley and by that time I had been married for a year, I had lost a daughter, and was finishing my master's degree.

Interview was similar to my early writing, in that it was speculative. It was about imaginative characters that didn't exist.vampires. It was a book in which people talked about their inner feelings. It was a book that reflected my inner feelings. It was just an accident that I hit on the vampires. It was a sheer accident that they worked in my stories.

 

You say you lost a daughter?

My daughter Michelle died when she was six. She died after two years of having an adult form of leukemia.

 

How did your writing process change after she died?

I was busy writing. Working on various things. I was working on a novel that was meant to be my master's thesis in creative writing and English. But afterwards, Interview poured out and reflected the grief and the loss and despair. That's what fueled my writing.

 

Did that help you recover?

Definitely. I didn't have anything to do once she died. I had finished school and I didn't have anything. Writing was the only hope of doing something meaningful with my life.

 

Wasn't Interview With a Vampire one of your first books?

It was the first.

 

And it became one of the best-selling books of all time. It's almost like you were put on earth to write.

I hope so.it's the only thing I know how to do.(laughs).

 

Do you have regrets about writing The Vampire Chronicles now?

I don't have regrets about those books. They reveal a journey to God. They reveal a spiritual search for meaning. They reflect great anxiety and great unhappiness and the dark night of being away from God. But they are about the struggle and the refusal of the characters to despair. They come near to despair but they never give up trying to save their souls, even though they are told they are cursed. And it reflects the way I felt when I lost my faith. I thought I would never find faith again, and that there was no God. So I felt the way the characters in the book felt. I sought meaning in art, in the beauty of the natural world. Like the characters, the search [was] to try to make something meaningful in spite of the way they feel. They are very peculiar, very eccentric books. But they were never demonic. That was a misperception by the people who read them. They are really about God.

 

Are you optimistic about your fans picking up your new book?

I want very much to get the book into their hands. And many of them are very receptive. But not all of them are. However, I would also like to get it to new readers.  

 

In the past, you had been quoted as saying "The vampires are always there, they never leave." Are they still there?

No. They are gone.

 

You've said your husband Stan was your inspiration for Lestat-the main character of your Vampire series. Tell us about that.

Actually, I based Lestat physically on Stan. Long blonde hair, six feet tall, with feline grace.  All that was Stan, plus Lestat's strength and his ability to take charge. I was Louis in the first book. I was the passive one. It was a mirror of our relationship.

 

How did his death in 2002 affect your writing?

I don't think the process changed so much. I had committed to writing the book Christ the Lord prior to his illness and I think it carried me through Stan's illness. It gave me strength to keep going. Everything you go through as a writer ultimately helps you as a writer.

 

Of the writers that most influenced you, do you feel they wrote out of grief or happiness?

That's an interesting question. I immediately think of Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and Dickens. I think they all experienced much of both.  I sought writers who had a balance. 

Take Virginia Woolf for instance. She suffered terrible grief and fear of madness. All of that is apparent in her work, and yet there's this wonderful happiness and celebration of life that comes through.

 

Did you have a fear of madness?

Yes, I did.  Many times I wondered if I wasn't one drop of chemical away from being crazy. But, that has passed.  I've lived through it.

 

What did you love most about Stan?

His combination of warmth and strength. The warmth and intimacy we shared throughout our love affair. He was such a strong person, such a truth teller. We had a love affair that lasted for over 40 years. It was simple really.

 

How did you make a marriage of 40 years work?

Commitment. I watched a lot of my friends get married and divorced, have boyfriends, live-in lovers, different fathers for their children. I ended up a conservative after watching all of that.

 

Was your conversion a slow process or a "burning bush" experience?

It was a slow process.  My return to faith and the Catholic Church was in 1998. But when I really committed myself to Christ in 2000 and got the vision for Christ the Lord, that was a burning bush experience.

 I was sitting in church and mulling it all over. At the time I was still writing books that reflected the way I felt before I came back to the Church, and I couldn't go on like that. And suddenly I knew I had to consecrate myself to Christ and he would help me.  I needed to give him everything.  I walked out of the church a different person.

 

From vampires to Christ, that's quite a switch.

There's been a huge transformation in me. I simply don't suffer from that fear and desperation that I felt for all those years. It's gone. I may suffer other things, like grief, sorrow, and remorse, but not things from before. Not that terror.

However, I've had a taste of it, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and all those people were suffering and we needed to send help. I was frightened for them. I felt the dark wing of fear touch me, but I prayed.

 

You were born in New Orleans and left only two months before Hurricane Katrina hit. Was your old neighborhood affected?

Yes, I was born in New Orleans, but my old neighborhood, the Garden District, was not deeply affected. It was on high ground. But many of my relatives and friends ended up with no houses at all. Terrible things have happened. It's like the aftermath of a war. It's chaotic. Nobody was prepared for that.

 

Readers will notice that blood seems to be a central theme in your past books and now, in Christ the Lord. What is it about blood?

The blood is the life. That's why you can't drink it. You have to dash it on the altar. It belongs to the Lord. It's such a potent image. It runs all through life. It runs through our language and through our way of looking at the world. There is a central obsession with blood. It's something to be profoundly respected.

 

But it seems blood is mostly associated with evil.

Yes, the violence on television is incredible. The morbid fascination of torturing children in primetime is just sickening.

 

What attracted you to Jesus Christ?

How can I put it into words? He's the savior of the world. He offers the message that can save the world. It's to love and to serve. To love everybody with your whole heart.

 

What mattered to you before that doesn't matter now?

The fact that the truth is not relative. The truth is crucial, and yet you have to negotiate it with other people because it's the only way we can live together. If we don't love other people we will destroy ourselves. I can see that now more vividly than before.

Faith is such a gift. I wish I could share that with everyone in the room. I wish I could get rid of people's suspicion of religion and people's fear of religion. That we, the religious people, are bad. We've lost credibility in America. We're associated too much with intolerance and persecution. We have to get that credibility back. 

 

What do you want people to remember about you?

That I was a good writer.

 

Do you feel the church has embraced you back or been more skeptical of your return?

They have embraced me completely. It's been absolutely wonderful.  Beyond what I ever dreamed.

 

Anne Rice's new novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is published by Knopf.

 

Trish Teves is a San Diego-based writer and she interviewed Anne Rice for Risen-a pop culture magazine that explores the worldviews of musicians, artists, athletes, filmmakers, and authors. This excerpt of the interview is reprinted by permission of Risen Media (www.risenmagazine.com).



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