The Vampire Lestat; The Queen of the Damned; The Tale of the Body Thief;
Memnoch the Devil; The Vampire Armand; Merrick; Blood and Gold; Blackwood Farm;
Blood Canticle; Pandora; Vittorio the Vampire; Cry to Heaven; The Mummy;
Servant of the Bones; The Witching Hour; Lasher; Taltos … Anne Rice
The Vampire Companion … Katherine Ramsland
The Witches Companion … Katherine Ramsland
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt; Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana; Called
Out of Darkness … Anne Rice
“Mike bought [Interview with the Vampire] at Pic-n-Pac,
the first of what became the Vampire Chronicles [this was back in what I think
of as our Rack Period of finding books in the late 70’s]. I had tons of Anne
Rice once upon a time, but then I sold them all; [Interview] is the only
one I have left [and it is for the memories]. I got tired of her cult and her
personal [religious] vacillations.” But don’t get me wrong. For years I enjoyed
her serial fiction as what Graham Greene called ‘entertainments’.
I stopped reading new Rice novels about 2010. Her books seemed
to be growing more convoluted as she tried to draw all the strands of her ‘mythology’
together, with vampires, angels, ghosts, mummies, werewolves, and a
supernatural investigation agency (the Talamasca) from her various books
(interesting conceptions by themselves) rubbing elbows rather promiscuously in
what were becoming less novels of ideas and more like bloated self-fan-fic.
I confess my final decision to abandon Rice’s work probably had
something to do with her leaving the Catholic Church again after re-joining it
late in life, for what appeared to be political reasons and not reasons of faith.
It seemed to me that she had been an icon (which can be dangerously close to an
idol) for too long for her to submit to being a subject, that she felt she wasn’t
appreciated enough by the Church, and, worst of all, that her followers were
becoming less dedicated. While she still claimed faith in Christ, it was on her
own terms. This was years before I joined the Catholic Church myself, but her posturing
and the convolutions of her new novels were unpalatable enough to tip my
opinions and push me out of my compulsive reading loop.
Anne Rice died December 11, 2021, at the age of eighty. Deus misereatur animae suae.
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