Over 40 years after the publication of her first supernatural novel, Anne Rice has returned to the monsters that made her famous. This month, she is promoting Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis,her second Vampire Chronicles novel since she returned to the series in 2014, as social media buzzes about the new Vampire Chronicles TV show written by her son, the acclaimed gay novelist Christopher Rice.Rice's cultural resurgence follows a dramatic life and career filled with both setbacks and comebacks. After her daughter, Michelle, died at age five, Rice wrote a novel about a child vampire living with two older bisexual male vampires, whom Rice presented as complicated instead of as monsters. She called her novel Interview with the Vampire. Although today critics accept novelists' and TV writers' portrayals of vampires as complicated characters, critics at the time ravaged the book for its humane treatment of vampires and frank description of sexuality: "To pretend that it has any purpose beyond suckling eroticism is rank hypocrisy," wrote Edith Milton in the New Republic. But readers loved it, and it launched the franchise that Rice continues to write.Since then, Rice has lived through Richard Nixon, written a Sleeping Beauty–inspired erotic series, watched her erotica books get banned, lost her husband, returned to Catholicism, left the church a second time, watched the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage, written another Sleeping Beauty–inspired erotica book, and finally earned respect for her forward-thinking writing about vampires and sexuality. In between signings of her 35th book, Rice spoke to us about her newest work, her early critics' homophobia, and why she's not afraid of Donald Trump.Read more on Broadly
Advertisement