Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,789

This is the grave of Anne Rice.

Born in 1941 in New Orleans, Howard Allen Frances O’Brien smartly went by Anne. Who the hell names their daughter Howard? Is this the Tammy Wynette response song to Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”? Rice actually addressed this later in life, saying:

Well, 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.

Anyway, she grew up middle class. Her father was a Postal Service executive and writer as a hobby. Writing was big in their house generally. But they didn’t own a home. They rented a house from her grandmother. Her mother was also a serious drunk and her grandmother took over a lot of the mothering for Rice and her siblings. Her mother ended up dying when Rice was 15. At that point, she and her sisters were placed in a Catholic boarding school. She ended up in a public high school and met her future husband Stan Rice there, graduating in 1959. But that took awhile. She went to Texas Women’s University and then North Texas State (both in Denton), dropped out and moved to San Francisco for awhile, living in the Haight before the goddamn hippies ruined it. Eventually, she married Rice, he moved to San Francisco, and they lived back in the Haight, like others watching it change before their eyes. Rice remembered just thinking it was weird, but she had writing to do and basically didn’t care what was going on in the streets.

What she was doing instead was working on Interview with a Vampire, published in 1976. I’ve never read it, or anything by Rice for that matter, so I can’t really comment on the quality or aesthetics of it, but I am sure commenters can have this debate amongst themselves. She had actually written an original version of this that she published as a short story in 1968. The plot feels largely ridiculous when you read a summary, but if you are going to write gothic horror, 18th century New Orleans with slaves as victims seems like a path. Writing this was also a really important personal moment for Rice. Her daughter contracted cancer in 1970 and died two years later, only 6 years old. Rice fell into a serious depression and drank heavily to deal with it. Writing the story, with the young girl in it based on her own daughter, helped her out of it. As she said after it came out, “For the first time, I was able to describe my reality, the dark, gothic influence on my childhood. It’s not fantasy for me. My childhood came to life for me.”

Interview with a Vampire was also tremendously popular. The reviews were mixed at best, with many critics thinking it was pretty dumb. As Edith Milton wrote in The New Republic, “To pretend that it has any purpose beyond suckling eroticism is rank hypocrisy” In the New York Times, Leo Braudy wrote,  “But there is no story here, only a series of sometimes effective but always essentially static tableaus out of Roger Corman films, and some self‐conscious soliloquizing out of Spiderman comics, all wrapped in a ballooning, pompous language.” So, ouch.

But it sold and Rice would dedicate most of her creative life to its sequels–12 in total. It took until 1985 to get the first sequel out but then she churned them out like a machine. That of course led to the Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt starring adaptation of the original novel, directed by Neil Jordan. I’ve never seen it. It did win two craft based Oscar nominations and Kirsten Dunst was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for her work in it as the girl. She had other books as well, such as Cry to Heaven, a book about two castrati. Need more books on that topic.

Rice had a lot of personal issues–not only alcoholism, but pretty serious OCD and she also was a seeker in many ways. On the last point, in the mid 2000s, she re-embraced the Catholicism of her childhood in a big time way and there was no moderation for her on much of anything. So for awhile, she published what sound like really terrible fictional adaptations of Jesus stories. Then she returned to secular humanism, with equal fervor. She also, under the pen names of Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure (eyeroll) published quite a bit of erotic fiction, including Exit to Eden, a BDSM novel from 1985 that became a 1994 film starring Dana Delany and Paul Mercurio and directed by Garry Marshall. It is supposedly atrocious. Roger Ebert’s epic pan review noted that it was supposed to be sexy, but the 4th page of his notes on the film became his grocery list.

Well, whatever. Rice made a ton of money. She was especially popular with queer readers, who identified with the social alienation of her characters. She has become enormously influential in the vampire genre as well. As someone who basically loathes all forms of horror and fantasy as being unbelievably dumb, vampire movies at least are the one partial exception I might occasionally make, if they are really, really well done.

Rice dealt with quite a few health issues later in life, including nearly dying a few times. She had a diabetic coma in 1988. Then in 2003, a heavily overweight Rice had gastric bypass surgery, which caused her a bowel obstruction shortly after and she nearly died of that in 2004. That’s what led her back to Catholicism. Then in 2010, she made a public announcement that she was done with being a Christian. I guess it was a good few years, but she did retain her private faith. She died in 2021, at the age of 80. It was a stroke that finally felled her.

Anne Rice is buried in Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

In 2003, Rice won the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Horror Writers Association. If you would like this series to visit other winners of this award, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Franz Belknap Long, who won one of the initial awards in 1987, is in The Bronx and Clifford Simak, who also won one of the 1987 awards, is in Minneapolis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.