Well, I just found something that had me tearing up… after several days of being weepy already (Kentucky, I grieve for you). Anne Rice, author extraordinaire, passed away from a massive stroke last night. As a constantly-depressed twenty-something, I used to devour her books to escape, especially the Vampire Chronicles. Yeah, not everyone’s cuppa, but I really enjoyed her work. Her writing style informed mine: full of colour, sensation, texture. She could write rings around me, though. I doubt I’ll ever get to her calibre, but she was one of the ones who inspired me in my Gothic meanderings. She included all of the senses she could in her work, and made vampires sexy, yet still horrifying.
She was 80 years old, a good long life of many moves to the cities her characters lived in, having a son turned writer himself, losing the love of her life, fellow writer Stan Rice when she was in her sixties.
I was already in the Gothic subculture, wearing black, smoking clove cigarettes and all the rest of the stereotypical Gothic stuff. The other night-critters had nothing on my devotion to the scene. I had a library of music and books that suited my tastes: vampires and Bauhaus, fantasy villains and The Cure, witches and Siouxsie and the Banshees, mummies and Sisters of Mercy. My musical tastes have since evolved into harder, more bass-driven stuff—Industrial, Psy-trance, Death and Black Metal (KMFDM, Juno Reactor, Cradle of Filth, etc), but her books always stayed.
I wore out the spine of my paperback copy of Interview With the Vampire, eventually replacing it with a hardback version. I still have her works in my library, where they’ll likely stay: The Vampire Chronicles, The Mayfair Witches were the two series I spent most time with, though I enjoyed her Ramses the Damned, too (there are two books more in the the Mummy series that I haven’t read, yet-one of which is coming out next year).
All in all, I think I only have a third of her output (no interest in the erotica, nor the religious stuff), but dang, I could lose myself in those pages. The way she described scenes, I could picture the events in the stories, even provide the voice-acting. I have Prosopagnosia—face blindness—so my mind’s eye couldn’t bring up the faces of most of the actors I had in mind. But their voices I can easily recall. If her stuff were to be animated a la Japanese anime, I know who to get for the voice acting.
Interesting little tidbit about Ms. Rice: she was born Oct 4th, the Feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, my favourite saint. I happen to be an atheist, but a saint devoted to animals can come over to my side of the religious/not religious divide any day. It also happens to be the day my Lovely Diva, the (not so) Undying One, passed over the Rainbow Bridge this year at the venerable age of twenty. Rice also died on the anniversary of the death of my first fiancee. He passed of cancer back in 2017. *sigh* The interconnections, however coincidental, seem interesting to me, anyway. I’m sure some will find it a bit silly. :-P
So, how about you? Have you read any of her work? Enjoy it or hate it, the woman could WRITE, and was prolific as heck over a fifty-year career of authorship.
Anne Rice, October 4th, 1941—December 11th, 2021.