NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – Anne Rice, the gothic novelist greatest recognized for Interview With the Vampire, the 1976 e book that in 1994 turned a well-liked movie starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, died final Saturday (Dec 11). She was 80.
Her son, Christopher Rice, wrote on social media that the trigger was problems from a stroke. His publish didn’t say the place she died.
Anne Rice was a largely unknown author when she turned a brief story she had written within the late Sixties into Interview With The Vampire, her first revealed novel. It contains a solitary vampire named Louis who’s telling his life story to a reporter, however Rice mentioned the story was her story as properly.
“I actually acquired into the character,” she advised The New York Occasions in 1988. “For the primary time, I used to be in a position to describe my actuality, the darkish, gothic affect on my childhood. It isn’t fantasy for me. My childhood got here to life for me.”
Many critics gave the e book brief shrift, seeming to not grasp both its tone or its enchantment.
“The publicity tells us Rice is ‘a stunning storyteller’,” Leo Braudy wrote within the Occasions. “However there is no such thing as a story right here, solely a sequence of generally efficient however at all times basically static tableaus out of Roger Corman movies, and a few self-conscious soliloquising out of Spider-Man comics, all wrapped in a ballooning, pompous language.”
The studying public, although, latched on. Interview With The Vampire turned a bestseller, and Rice discovered herself with a substantial fan base, which she proceeded to entertain with a sequence of follow-up novels that turned recognized collectively because the Vampire Chronicles.
The books, greater than a dozen in all, are extensively credited with fuelling a revival of curiosity in all issues vampiric, which has been mirrored on the large and small screens in addition to on stage ever since.
However Rice, who wrote dozens of books in all, was not a one-subject novelist. She wrote free-standing novels like Cry To Heaven (1982), concerning the careers of two castrati. Beneath the identify Anne Rampling, she wrote steamy novels together with Exit To Eden (1985), which featured intercourse slaves. And as A.N. Roquelaure, she wrote an erotic sequence generally known as the Sleeping Magnificence novels.
Rice’s followers are nothing if not passionate, keen to immerse themselves within the worlds she created.
“Once I go to my signings,” she advised ABC Information programme Day One in 1993, “I am probably the most boring particular person there. Everyone else is dripping with velvet and lace, and bringing me lifeless roses wrapped in leather-based handcuffs, and I adore it.”
Her books resonated not solely with followers of gothic romance, but additionally with readers who discovered a religious factor in them, some homosexual and transgender readers who recognized with their themes of isolation and alienation, and different teams.
Howard Allen O’Brien was born on Oct 4, 1941, in New Orleans to Howard and Katherine O’Brien. Oddly, she had been named after her father. By the point she was in first grade, she had adopted “Anne”. Her father labored for the postal service and her mom was a housewife.
She grew up in New Orleans, writing performs that she and her three sisters would carry out and imagining ghostly figures within the home windows of the New Orleans mansions she would stroll previous. Films like Dracula’s Daughter (1936) made a vivid impression.
So did her Roman Catholic upbringing and training, full of images that performed to her already vivid creativeness.
“To take a seat and take heed to the miracles that occurred to this saint or that saint, or how any person floated up within the air throughout prayer, I imply, that was simply the traditional fare in Catholic faculty,” she mentioned.
When she was 15, her mom died. She mentioned she believed the trigger was alcoholism, one thing Rice would battle with later, though in a 2008 video, she mentioned she had been sober for 28 years.
Her father remarried and moved the household to Texas, the place in highschool Rice first met Stan Rice, a fellow pupil.
She attended Texas Lady’s College for a time, however dropped out and tried residing within the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. She had made an impression on Stan Rice in highschool and he sought her out. They started an intense correspondence and, ultimately, he proposed by mail.
They married in 1961 and settled in San Francisco, the place Stan Rice, who died in 2002, turned a poet and trainer.
Anne Rice earned a level at San Francisco State College, although in political science, not literature – “I used to be a poor reader,” she wrote in her memoir, “and, in truth, could not main in English as a result of I couldn’t learn the quantities of Chaucer or Shakespeare assigned within the lessons.”
A pivotal occasion for the couple occurred in 1972, when their daughter, Michelle, died of leukaemia on the age of 5. Rice mentioned the loss left her bereft and directionless for a time, till she tried returning to writing to shake off the melancholy.
“I needed to write down and write and write, and pour out my feelings, and make tales, and create one thing,” she advised ABC within the 1993 interview. “That was my response to seeing one thing die and one thing cross out of my arms like that, and seeing this lovely baby die, it doesn’t matter what I did or anyone else did.”
Interview With The Vampire – which features a younger woman who resembles Michelle – was the end result.
She adopted up that e book with The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen Of The Damned (1988) and others within the Vampire Chronicles sequence. The most recent, Blood Communion, was revealed in 2018.
A full record of Rice’s survivors was not instantly obtainable.
Within the 1993 interview with ABC, Rice mentioned a part of her fascination with vampires as a literary gadget was that they could possibly be seen as a metaphor for the human situation. “As a result of,” as she put it, “all of us make ruthless compromises in an effort to reside, do not you assume?”
She maybe had a vampiric aspect herself.
“I need to be beloved and by no means forgotten,” she mentioned. “I am actually grasping, you already know? I need to be immortal.”