Anne Rice

From Philosopedia.org

Rice, Anne (4 October 1941 – )

Howard Allen O'Brien, often described as a vampire novelist and author of best-selling gothic and religious-themed books, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Catholic Irish-Americans Howard, a postal worker, and Katherine Allen O'Brien, a feminist.

Upon first entering school and being asked by a nun what her name was, she said it was Anne, a name she thought was pretty. The mother who was with her did not correct her and from then on she kept the name.

Rice's sister, Alice Borchardt (6 October 1939 - 24 July 2007), was an author of fantasy, horror, and historical fiction.

For forty-one years she was married to poet Stan Rice, until his death in 2002. Their daughter Michele died of leukemia.

Interview With the Vampire (1976) was the first in a Vampire Chronicles series - she also writes as A. N. Roquelaure and Anne Rampling. Nearly 100,000,000 of her books have been sold.

In 2001, S. T. Josh in The Modern Weird Tale provides a critical look at her characters' sexuality and their homoerotic feelings toward each other. The bisexual characters are searching for a love beyond gender, especially because the vampires were not of human society and had different societal standards. Those who like her popular fiction far outnumber her critics, who find her work baroque, "low-brow pulp," and redundant.

An atheist for decades, she returned in 1998 to her Roman Catholic faith. A Newsweek article in 2004 reported that she would "write only for the Lord." She called Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, her first novel in this genre, the beginning of a trilogy that will chronicle the life of Jesus.

In October 2008, she released an autobiography - Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession - describing her upbringing and her return to Catholicism. She describes her two decades of writing about vampires, demons, and witches:

• To be able to take the tools, the apprenticeship, whatever I learned from being a vampire writer, or whatever I was — to be able to take those tools now and put them in the service of God is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful opportunity. And I hope I can redeem myself in that way. I hope that the Lord will accept the books I am writing now.

Many of her fans have been left scratching their heads. "Her homoerotic novels and proud embrace of her son - out writer Christopher Rice - endeared her to many gay readers," wrote a reviewer of the autobiography in the gay journal, The Advocate (2 December 2008).

She now is in the position of having as her vocation "to write for Jesus Christ" and to belong "completely to the Man at the Top," at the same time writing about the church's war against gays such as her son.