Illumination and Darkness

“The truth is, I’ve found what those characters were looking for,” she confessed happily to the audience of 400 in the sanctuary that day. “I can’t continue those stories because they don’t work for me any more. The vampires are not metaphors for the outsider for me, because I don’t feel like an outsider anymore. I feel like I’m included in a great big wonderful family.”

This doesn’t quite mean ‘out with the old, in with the new,’ however. When I asked her about Lestat: The Musical, the Elton John and Bernie Taupin show which debuted last month in San Francisco, she said she thinks it is “really quite terrific,” vampiric content and all. “I think they captured the bittersweet, tragic tone of those books really well. It’s a sad musical, but it will still be a great musical to see.”

Leaving Home

Rice was raised in a Catholic home in the 1940s and 1950s, before the sweeping church reforms of Vatican II. “I grew up in a great big Irish Catholic family, and every single day, everything we did was colored by our faith,” she explained. “It was an atmosphere where life had meaning; you never had to think twice about it. You knew where you were going, you knew how blessed you were to be alive; you knew how good God was and how much he loved you.”

When she turned 18, Rice began to leave that world. She started college, and “for various reasons, like many young people that age, I lost that faith. I ceased to believe. I don’t know if that could have been any different now; what I was conscious of is I wanted to know the modern world. I wanted to read existential philosophers. I wanted to learn the grammar of the modern world.”

Her God-enchanted upbringing now began to feel limited and parochial compared to the new relationships she was forming. “I was surrounded by a lot of good people; they weren’t necessarily Christian, and they certainly weren’t Catholic. My faith, for whatever reasons, left me. And I was left with a consuming grief for that faith, and the ‘reality’ was atheism. I thought that’s what you had to face if you wanted to grow up; you had to realize that there was no God, there was no meaning. You were at the mercy of a meaningless universe, or a universe that only made sense biologically.”

Enter the Outsiders

This loss of a sense of God combined with personal tragedy propelled her to write. “I never stopped a search for meaning. And when I began to write books, they were dark books because they were about heroes and heroines who were searching for something of value in life, some kind of context for themselves through which they could be redeemed.” Though she told me she never actually engaged in occult practices or even believed in them, she saw her dark creations as ‘true’ in a metaphorical sense. “I took the vampire as a total reality, and asked: ‘What’s it like to live this life of darkness, to feel cut off from God, to be so close to humans that when you embrace them, you take their life?’”

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Anne continued to write and readers continued to respond. Her novels’ very titles were evocative of deep-seated longing: The Feast of All Saints, Cry to Heaven, Exit to Eden. Her work “turned out to be a record of grief, melancholy, and fear. Real fear of the meaningless quality of life, as I saw it at that time,” she told the assembled audience. “I was able to pour out everything I felt in that framework. I went on writing what could be described as ‘metaphysical thrillers.’ Always, the books were about the quest, the search, and the dissatisfaction of the characters. All their sensuality, all the material blessings they had…it simply was not enough.”

Memnoch the Devil, released a decade ago, was one of the hinges on which Rice’s spiritual coming of age turned. “My hero, the Vampire Lestat, went to heaven and hell,” she recounted. “He actually saw a glimpse of heaven, and I did my very best to describe the indescribable, based on all the things I’d ever read: People who had had near-death experiences, [as well as] the mystics and saints.” In the end, the totality of the experience overwhelms Lestat. “He rejects the whole picture in confusion, and he backs off, not knowing if the pictures he’s seeing are the truth, or some sort of illusion cooked up by the devil. And he’s back where I was at the time, not knowing the answers, left with the questions, and frightened. He says to the other characters, “We’ll never feel safe again.”

Christ the Hebrew

When I first acquired Christ the Lord, one of the first things I did was flip to the back, where Rice writes an extensive afterward detailing her research process for the series. I was impressed; she read enough Biblical and historical scholarship to give a seminary student an inferiority complex. This fastidious attention to detail presented me with a very different picture of Rice than the one of my fanciful earlier imaginings. If seances were allegedly her stock in trade before, couldn’t her faith in Jesus have arrived in some bolt-from-the-blue, Paul-on-Damascus-road experience? The N.T. Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson-admiring Researcher Rice seemed so erudite, so logical by contrast. So as I sat across from her, face to face, I had to ask: What drew her to faith? Was she a mystic or a historian?