Rice, Anne

Rice, Anne (1941- ), American writer, known for her bestselling novels about the supernatural. Rice was born Howard Allen O’Brien in New Orleans, Louisiana, but in her youth she changed her first name to Anne. She married Stan Rice in 1961 and was educated at Texas Woman’s University, San Francisco State College, and the University of California at Berkeley.

In Rice’s first novel, Interview with the Vampire (1976), made into a film by Neil Jordan starring Tom Cruise in 1994, a vampire tells his life story to a boy, thereby introducing the reader to the history and culture of vampires. The book begins a vampire saga that continues in several other books, which together constitute the Vampire Chronicles, a series noted for its sympathetic portrayal of vampires as romantic individuals who live outside mainstream society. The other Vampire Chronicles books include The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), The Vampire Armand (1998), and Blood and Gold (2001); the series concludes with Blood Canticle (2003). These novels are told from the point of view of the vampires rather than that of the victims. Through graphically described scenes, Rice’s supernatural characters search for their own identities in a vampire subculture in which death and sexuality are often intertwined. The Vampire Chronicles books also draw on such themes as homoeroticism, atheism, immortality, and the essential nature of good and evil. Rice’s creation, the nobleman turned vampire, Lestat, was brought to the Broadway stage in 2006 in a musical by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. She began a second series of vampire stories in 1998. This second series included Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires (1999) and Vittorio the Vampire (1999).

Rice’s books have also been published under two pseudonyms. Under the name Anne Rampling she wrote the mainstream romance novels Exit to Eden (1985) and Belinda (1986). She used the name A. N. Roquelaure for three books of erotica: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983), Beauty’s Punishment (1984), and Beauty’s Release (1985). Rice’s other books published under her own name include the historical novels The Feast of All Saints (1979) and Cry to Heaven (1982), as well as The Mummy, Or Ramses the Damned (1989), The Witching Hour (1990), Lasher (1993), Taltos: Lives of the Mayfair Witches (1994), and Violin (1997), all of which deal with aspects of the supernatural. Having made an unlikely volte-face in rediscovering her Catholic faith, Rice published an account of Jesus’s childhood, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, in 2005.