Anne Rice

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Image:AC LgPic Gen2.jpg Anne Rice (born October 4, 1941) is a best-selling American author of horror/fantasy books. She was born Howard Allen O'Brien, the second daughter in a Catholic Irish-American family. Rice's works have had a major influence on the "Goth" movement, and she has also published a number of works with sado-masochistic themes. She was married to the late poet Stan Rice and is the mother of novelist Christopher Rice. Her daughter, Michele, was born on September 21, 1966 and died of leukemia on August 5 1972. Anne's sister, Alice Borchardt, is also a noted genre author.

Rice was born and spent most of her life in New Orleans, Louisiana, the city that forms the background against which most of her stories take place. Her father moved the family to north Texas, taking up residence in Richardson, in 1958, when Anne was 16, and she met Stan Rice, whom she would later marry, at Richardson High School. She began college at Texas Women's University in Denton, but relocated with Stan to California, where the couple put down roots in San Francisco. She would not return to New Orleans until 1989.[1]

About her unusual given name, Rice said: "My birth name is Howard Allen because apparently my mother thought it was a good idea to name me Howard. My father's name was Howard, she wanted to name me after Howard, and she thought it was a very interesting thing to do. She was a bit of a Bohemian, a bit of mad woman, a bit of a genius, and a great deal of a great teacher. And she had the idea that naming a woman Howard was going to give that woman an unusual advantage in the world. "

Anne became "Anne" on her first day of school, when a nun asked her what her name was. She blurted out "Anne" immediately, and her mother, who was with her, let it go without correcting her, knowing how self-conscious her daughter was of her real name.

Known for her avid interest in art and culture, Anne and her family occasionally took trips overseas to study the art later mentioned in her stories. More recently, following the death of her husband Stan Rice, she has relocated to the Coachella Valley, La Jolla, California to be nearer her son, Christopher. After spending most of her adult life as a self described atheist, Rice returned to the Roman Catholic Church in 1998, and she is currently working on a trilogy about the life of Jesus.

Rice has also published erotica under the pen names Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure, the latter of which was used primarily for more adult-oriented material. Her fiction is often described as lush and descriptive, and her characters' sexuality is fluid, often displaying homoerotic feelings towards each other. She also deals with philosophical and historic themes, weaving them in to the dense pattern of her books, and giving them a highly intellectual, if not highly literary, content. To her admirers, Rice's books are among the best in modern popular fiction, considered by some to possess those elements that create a lasting presence in the literary canon. To her critics, her novels are baroque, "low-brow pulp" and redundant.

A critical analysis of Rice's work can be found in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001).

1 Conversion to a Christian Novelist
2 The Vampire Chronicles
3 Film Adaptations
4 Health
5 Leaving New Orleans
6 Fanfiction Stance
7 Amazon incident
8 Books
9 See also
10 External links

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Conversion to a Christian Novelist

In October of 2005, Rice announced in a Newsweek article that she would "write only for the Lord". This action took place as she reaffirmed her allegiance to the Catholic church. CHRIST THE LORD: Out of Egypt was her first novel in this genre. She states this is the first novel in a trilogy that will chronicle the life of Christ.

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The Vampire Chronicles

She completed her first book, Interview with the Vampire, in 1973 and published it in 1976.

Interview with the Vampire can also be viewed as an example of psychedelic literature. Rice herself has denied ever having experimented with LSD. "I'm a totally conservative person. In the middle of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square." (New York Times, Nov 7, 1988) Her protagonist Louis, however, describes a heightened awareness after being transformed into a vampire which does mirror the LSD experience to some extent.

Rice has said that Claudia, the young girl in the book, was inspired by her late daughter.

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Film Adaptations

In 1994, Neil Jordan directed a motion picture adaption of Interview with the Vampire, based on the story, but with some minor changes. A second movie was later made, inspired by the second and third books in the original Vampire Chronicles series. The title was that of the third book, The Queen of the Damned. The storyline chosen by the producers of the second film is controversial among many fans of her books. Major plot points of both books were altered, and it has been rumoured that the second film's theatrical release was based solely on its producers' wish to capitalize on the death of Aaliyah. Another rumor being that Warner Bros. was already into its last year of owning motion picture rights to the first three Vampire Chronicles books, which would then have transferred back to author Anne Rice once this period was over. Once back in her ownership, she could then sell the rights to another company of her choosing. Knowing what little time they had left, despite the fact they've had the rights and opportunity to make the latter two movies for over seven years, Warner Bros. hastily hired writers to condense the books "The Vampire Lestat" and "The Queen of the Damned" into one movie in order to profit from their initial rights purchase.

A film named Exit to Eden based loosely on Rice's book of the same name starred Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd. The plot was seriously altered, with the work transformed from a love story into a police comedy, possibly due to the explicit S&M nature of the book.

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Health

Rice has Type 1 diabetes. This was discovered when she went into a diabetic coma in December 1998. She is an advocate for people to get tested for diabetes. Because of a lifelong battle with her weight as well as depression due to the long illness and subsequent death of her husband, Rice's weight rose to 254 pounds. Tired of dealing with sleep apnea, limited mobility, and other weight-related problems, she had gastric bypass surgery on January 15, 2003.

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Leaving New Orleans

On January 30, 2004 Rice announced her plans to leave New Orleans to move the suburb of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. She had already put the largest of her three homes in Uptown New Orleans up for sale, and plans to sell the other two. She cited living alone since the death of her husband and her son's moving out of state as the reasons. "Simplifying my life, not owning so much, that's the chief goal", said Rice. "I'll no longer be a citizen of New Orleans in the true sense."

In spring 2005 Anne Rice moved to La Jolla, California. She calls her new home "Paradise West". Some have speculated that Rice also wished for more privacy from the constant attentions of her fans, who were known to camp out in front of her house. Sometimes, up to 200 or more would gather to see her leave for church on Sundays.

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Fanfiction Stance

Rice is very adamant about preventing any fan fiction of her books-- on April 7, 2000, she released a statement on her website that prohibited all fanfiction involving her work. This caused the removal of thousands of fanfics from the popular Fanfiction.Net website.

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Amazon incident

On September 6, 2004, Rice posted a reply to a number of negative reviews that had appeared on Amazon.com regarding Blood Canticle. She titled her reply, "From the Author to the Some of the Negative Voices Here." This post generated a great deal of publicity online -- partly because authors rarely post or respond to reviews on Amazon, and partly because of the tone and nature of her text. Many previous reviews had criticized the quality of writing in Blood Canticle as lazy or shoddy; so when Rice replied by posting a 1,200-word paragraph wherein she proudly dismisses the utility of editors, the incident became fodder for weblogs and Internet sites.

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