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Among the people who have contributed to the significant increase of interest in the vampire in the last decades, few rank with writer Anne Rice. Her major vampire character, Lestat de Lioncourt, who was introduced in her 1976 book, Interview with the Vampire, has taken his place besides Bram Stoker's Dracula and Dark Shadows' Barnabas Collins as one of the three major literary figures molding the image of the contemporary vampire.

Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien in the Irish Community in New Orleans, Louisiana, and changed her name to Anne shortly after starting school. During her late teens she grew increasingly sceptical of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church in which she had been raised. She not only rejected the unique place of the Roman Church among other religious bodies, but also pronounced her disbelief in its major affirmations of the divine work of Jesus Christ and the existence of God. She replaced her childhood religious teachings with a rational ethical system, an integral element in her reworking of the vampire tradition.

Both Rice and her poet husband Stan Rice began writing professionally durning the early 1960's, but he was the first to receive recognition. In 1970 he won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for peotry. Rice sold her first story, "October 4, 1948," in 1965, but it was not until 1973 that she felt ready to quit her job in order to write full time.

The Vampire Chronicles: As early as 1969 Rice had written a short story that she called "Interview with the Vampire." In 1973 she turned it into a novel and attempted to sell it. Following several rejections, Alfred A. Knopf bought it, and it was published in 1976. The book became an unexpected success and has remained in print both in hardback and paperback. Her second novel, The Feast of All Saints, was published by Simon & Schuster three years later, and a third, Cry to Heaven, appeared in 1982. Meanwhile another side of Rice emerged in a series of novels published under a pseudonym, A. N. Roquelaure. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty's Punishment (1984), and Beauty's Release: The Continued Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty (1985) were adult erotic fantasy novels. The sado-masochistic theme in the Roquelaure novels carried over into the more conventional novels published under a second pseudonym, Anne Rampling. In the midst of the release of these novels, her important vampire short story appeared in Redbrook in 1984, "The Master of Rampling Gate."

Rice returned to the vampire theme in 1985 with The Vampire Lestat, the most heralded of what was to become the "Vampire Chronicles" series. This volume further develped the character of Lestat introduced in her earlier work. He emerged as a strong secular individualist who took to the vampire's life quite naturally. Born into the lesser aristocracy, he defied the vampire establishment in Paris and decided to make his own way in the world. A man of action who rarely rested in indecision, he was also deeply affected by poetry and music and freely showed his emotions. Rice described him as both an androgynous ideal and an expression of the man she would be if she were male. Like Rice, Lestat rejected his Catholic past and had no aversion to the religious weapons traditionally used against his kind. Seeking moral justification for his need to feed on fresh blood, he began to develop a vampire ethic, selecting those who had done some great wrongs as his victims.

The success of The Vampire Lestat led to demands for more, and Rice responded with The Queen of the Damned (1988). Like the previous volumes, it became a bestseller and soon found its way into a paperback edition. Previously, Interview with the Vampire had also appeared in an audio cassette version (1986), and the publishers moved quickly to license audio versions of The Queen of the Damned (1988) and The Vampire Lestat (1989).

Rice was now a recognised author and her writing was regularly the subject of serious literary critics. She continued to produce at a steady rate and successively completed The Mummy (1989), The Witching Hour (1990), and Lasher (1993). In the meantime, further adventures of Lestat appeared in the fourth volume of the Vampire Chronicles, The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), released on audio cassette simultaneously with its hardback edition. In 1991 Katherine Ramsland finished her biography of Rice, entitled Prism of the Night, and moved on to compile a comprehensive reference volume, The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (1993).

No sooner did Ramsland's volume appear that a fifth volume of the "Vampire Chronicles," Memnoch the Devil took Lestat into the supernatural realms of heaven and hell (after which Ramsland issued a revised edition). Memnoch was not as well received as the previous volumes, as its story tended to subordinate plot to philosophical musings on theological issues. After the publication of Memnoch, Rice announced that Lestat had left her and, to the disappointment of his fans, that there would be no more Lestat novels. However she soon returned to the vampire theme with Pandora (immediately available on cassette and CD), the first of a projected series of books following the other characters in the "Vampire Chronicles."

The Vampire Book (The Encyclopedia of the Undead) ~ J. Gordon Melton

A novel idea: Publisher and moviemaker betting public will sink teeth
into sympathetic account of a vampire's life

BERKELEY, Calif. - "It had always been my desire to write, not just intellectual books for other writers, but for a broad audience. I've been excited for years that Hemingway, Dickens and Shakepeare cut through all classes with their work. I hoped and prayed that my work would be appreciated by many."

While critics have not likened her work to the aforementioned, Anne Rice's first published novel, Interview With the Vampire, seems unlikely to go unnoticed. Published by Alfred A. Knopf last May, it was bought by Paramount for $250,000 (the rights are now the property of Paramount ex-vice president Richard Sylbet, who is having Frank De Felitta write the screenplay).

BALLANTINE, which spent a whopping $700,000 for paperback rights, will issue its editions next month with a promotional campaign that will cost, said an official, "well over $100,000." Bookstores will get coffins in which to display Vampire and there will be a supposedly record amount (for a book) of TV advertising, plus billboards, airports and "points of transit" posters, matchbooks, T-shirts ("I've Got an Interview With the Vampire"), etc.

It was written in five weeks by the 35-year-old woman to meet a deadline in a writing contest. It didn't win anything - but within eight months her life was turned around.

A year ago the Rices (he's a poet) lived in a two-bedroom Berkeley apartment cluttered with books and artifacts. Mrs. Rice typed all night in the same room husband Stan slept (her best hours for working are late at night) and it didn't bother him. He slept through it, and in the morning rose to go to his $18,000-a-year job as associate professor of creative writing at San Fransisco State.

TODAY, RICE is on a sabbatical and Mrs. Rice works in her own study on the second floor of their 12-room Federalist Georgian house. Surrounded by paintings bought on a recent trip to Haiti, where she did research on her second novel, and leaning back relaxed on the huge sectional in her living room, she talked about the events of the past year.

"In a way I've now become more reclusive, with no need for acquaintences for the sake of acquaintances. This may have happened because I reached a point where I could write what I wanted to write. After years of trying different things and tossing out a lot of experimental things, I think a writer reaches a point where you find your own voice. You can write what you want. Though it's a continual struggle, the path is defined to a certain extent."

She wrote for 10 years before publishing anything except a short story in a college literary magazine. "I wasn't writing to sell, but I felt that if my writing did get out it would sell. I feel that to be distributed in America, to have your books sold from coast to coast, you have to have a major publisher push them. I knew my writing had a saleable aspect, but it's almost impossible to figure out what will sell.

"AS FAR AS I know no one has ever written a vampire novel quite like this one, where the protagonists are all vampires." The major character, Louis, relates the story of the last 200 years of his life to a young FM disc jockey in a Victorian house in San Francisco. He was inducted in 1791 by the sinister, elegant Lestat. As Louis embraces the habits of vampires and moves away from human ties, he finds the child, Claudia, who becomes a vampire. She has the mind of an adult and the physical appearance of a beautiful 5-year-old. The plot takes Louis and Claudia to Austria, Transylvania and Paris, where they search for others like themselves and seek to unravel the mysteries of their preternatural existence.

Why Vampires? "I was always in love with the image that I saw in horror movies as a kid, of vampires as elegant, tormented people. Louis is a metaphor for a man driven to take lives, yet one who feels guilt because of this. The novel asks, 'What do you do in a world without God? What are your responsibilities?' The answer is that even if you have no proof of God, you cannot escape your obligations to your fellow man."

The writing of the novel was in part fueled by tragedy. In 1972 the Rices' 5-year-old child Michele died of leukemia. Mrs. Rice admits that writing the novel was a form of catharsis for her in dealing with her own feelings of guilt. "I felt the way Louis in the novel feels after his brother dies. He feels, 'I can't live now that he's dead.' I felt I couldn't live now that she was dead. Why? because she was my child and I couldn't save her. It's still very painful to talk about."

On her literary influences: "Dickens and Mary Renault. I know it's an unlikely combination. I think Dickens is the master of creating characters with whom we can sympathise. Remember when the captain was bringing over installments of 'The Old Curiosity Shop' on the ship from England to New York, and he shouted to the people on the wharf that Little Nell was dead - they tore the wharf to pieces?" She laughs brightly. "in Mary Renault's 'The Persian Boy' she created characters with whom I become very deeply involved.

"A great deal of fiction is being writen today where nobody in it is worth caring about; the writer is not only asking you not to become involved, he is asking you to hate the character of have the same attitude of cynicism that he has. I frankly think that kind of writing is limited.

"What Shakespeare, Virgina Woolf and Hemingway all have in common is that they all had a tremendous compassion and love for their characters. I had a quote from Tolstoy on my buletin board which said, 'The measure of any author's popularity will be the love he gives to his created characters.' I think that kind of writer to me is the greater writer. The smaller writer is one who exposes people as beasts, as cynical. Great writers have created major characters larger than life, Shakespeare has too much compassion and love for the human spirit not to explore that character and bring out something in it.

"ONE OF MY HOPES with regard to the film of Interview With the Vampire is that the actor who is chosen as Louis will quickly get the sympathy of the audience and hold that sympathy. You have to be able to forgive Louis over and over for what he does."

The Rices are using their new income to travel. "We came to San Francisco in 1962 to live and go to school. (They met in high school in Richardson, Texas, and married when he was 18 and she was 19. Both later graduated with master's degrees from S.F, State.) "I was born in New Orleans, grew up there and what I saw in San Fransisco was another unique city that had a special flavour. I moved to Berkeley for the sunshine and big trees, so I could lie on the grass in the sun and read."

Kathy MacKay ~ Los Angeles Times 1977