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Celebrated writer Anne Rice passed away late Saturday evening from complications due to a stroke according to Variety; she was eighty years old.
When I was in junior high, there were few books that impacted me as profoundly as Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. The novel about an introspective vampire who relates his many-centuries old life to an intrepid interviewer, was sort of the Peyton Place to Stoker’s more serious-minded Dracula and Stephen King’s eerie phenomenon ‘Salem’s Lot. Looking back, it was soapy, high-camp but – and this is why I feel that novel out of the many more that Rice would go on to write has stood the proverbial test of time – it was unflinching when it came to oversized and heartfelt emotion. It was perhaps one of the first times (for better or for worse) we as readers could actually sympathize with a particular character type that had been predominantly written as pure evil. That was revelatory to my thirteen year old senses and I eagerly devoured every blessed page of Interview and actually sank into a funk when nearing my inaugural read of the misadventures of doomed Louis de Pointe du Lac and his eternal adversary Lestat.
I’d pretty much left behind Rice’s gothic and sex-drenched supernatural worlds of vampires by the time I hit my early twenties, only to be drawn back into the fold with the announcement of a big-screen adaptation of Interview with the Vampire set to star Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and River Phoenix. It’s a testament to the power of Rice’s source material that, after losing the chief draw of such an adaptation for me – actor River Phoenix who had been set to essay the role of the interviewer and unexpectedly passed away within weeks of shooting his role – that I still showed up on opening night of Interview and, inspired by Neil Jordan’s successful adaptation of the novel into film, began a re-read of all of Rice’s vampire novels which were now being billed as “The Vampire Chronicles.” Anne Rice’s writing was that potent and mesmerizing not just to me, but an entire world of fans of her words and characters. Anne Rice was the darker more profoundly disturbing version of J.K. Rowling, made manifest decades before a boy wizard named Harry was even a gleam in his creator’s eye.
Of course, Anne Rice herself may no longer walk among us, yet her books which number in the dozens still remain, a salient reminder of an author who held us all by the hand and allowed us the gift of looking at an old trope such as the vampire and seeing it as something altogether more complex and tragically beautiful. Rest easy, Ms. Rice; you will be missed.
