Anne Rice had a truly deep and unique relationship with her fans. In her heyday in the 1980's and 1990's she was known to hold epic multi-hour book signings often participating quirky setpieces like being driven around in her own Jazz funeral while she was still alive or climbing out of coffins wearing wedding dresses or elaborate Babylonian headdresses. She was also directly involved with the fan club for her most famous creation, the Vampire Lestat, and frequently attended the club's famous Haloween Vampire Balls in New Orleans.
She was uniquely accessible to her fans both during the more analogue times in which she had a physical newsletter (Commotion Strange anyone?) and had a published telephone number for fans to call and leave messages. In the digital era, she had a for-the-time robust author website and later a well-developed community on Facebook for an audience she referred to as People of the Page.
And then there’s the actual content of her books which formed the relationship to her fans even in the primitive 1970’s. While she may been reduced to a "horror" writer and her books can be found in that part of the bookstore, Anne's books meant so much more to her readers. We can and do argue about her particular genre mash-up (see below) but what’s most important to her readership is the sincerity of her writing and her outsider perspective.
Readers of her first novel 1976’s Interview with the Vampire encountered not just an ordinary vampire tale (vampire stories were and are a dime a dozen) but something much more compelling, a story with vampires which was full of emotional realism about supernatural characters living on the edge of human society and struggling with questions of good and evil and love and loss.
And it turns out that the first generation of Anne Rice readers really responded to these themes. If you were a queer reader in 1976 to some extent you knew what it was like to live in a shadowy subculture and if you were also religious perhaps you knew something of Louis’ tortured existence. If you were an adult woman who had suffered the lifelong indignities of being infantilized and not taken seriously then perhaps you knew Claudia’s rage. If you were a parent who had experienced the unimaginable loss of a child as Rice herself did then you would recognize the loss and grief that elevated the book to something beyond a basic vampire tale. And, really, any American living a comfortable existence within spitting distance of poverty and human misery might feel like a bit of a vampire themselves if they stop to think about. There is something fundamentally vampiric about runaway capitalism.
I was introduced to Anne Rice’s work through a battered copy of Interview loaned to me by my “cool” high school friend Autumn in 1992. I loved it and as a queer kid responded to the coded homoeroticism in the book but more than anything as a son who felt saddled with a poor excuse for a mentor in the form of my father, I empathized with Louis’ frustration and disappointment in Lestat as “the pig’s ear from which nothing good can be made.” I felt seen and was thereafter a dedicated Rice reader.
Like all her fans I was sad to hear of her passing on 2021. When it was announced that her celebration of life would be happening this year and would be produced by her son, the novelist Christopher Rice and his producing partner, I jumped at the chance. Not only had I never experienced New Orleans during Halloween but I had missed out on all of the Rice-related events of my youth such has the Lestat Balls (which apparently are still a thing.)
The Anne Rice Celebration of life took place on Saturday, November 1, All Saints Day at the Orpheum Theater off Canal Street, the handsome Twentieth-century boulevard which forms the Uptown boundry of the French Quarter. I had looked up the space beforehand and had an approximate idea of where it was located but as soon as we reached the street we were greeted with a line of people in various levels of Gothic attire. There were lots of vampire characters, people in different period outfits, some Victorian ladies clutching creepy porcelain dolls, some Egyptians, etc. I was wearing a polo, navy slacks and dress shoes so I felt a little underdressed. Note to self: when traveling keep a Goth outfit packed, you never know when you will need one. My colorful Golden Age Flash costume would not have been appropriate.
The venue itself is a beautiful old baroque-style theater which was decked out with wonderful old photos of Anne and other Rice-related decor, including life-sized replicas of Akasha and Enkil, the two progenitor vampires from her books. We had a pair of vertigo-inducing seats up on the nosebleeds, which required me to stare down through my progressive lenses with my glasses on the tip of my nose.
The event was a mix of biographical video, guest speakers talking about Anne, a few music performances, and some segments with actors reading selections from her books which even included some deep cuts like the Sleeping Beauty series, Violin, and Christ Out of Egypt among the better known Vampire, Witch and Mummy books.
There were some certainly some really lovely and even funny anecdotes from the speakers, particularly from the event’s producers Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn (who are also hosts of the Dinner Party Podcast) although others seemed to misunderstand the fundamental assignment and focused mostly on themselves.
I would say the strongest part of the whole thing were the biographical video segments which were at times moving, revealing, and delightful. I appreciated that they didn’t lean away from Anne’s often awkward and quirky persona and included such things as members of her housekeeping staff reacting to finding rooms full of porcelain dolls and mummies.
I’m not sure how much of video they had completed or what further uses are envisioned beyond this event but I would love to see a full length documentary built around this footage. For an author of Rice’s profile there is little biographical info available about her aside from the early 90’s era Ramsland book. From the same time period there is the moody BBC documentary Birth of the Vampire. I am including a version of this that I have restored below. But there is little that covers her later life.
What is unavoidably clear now too is existing tension between the Rice estate, which Christopher heads and the Anne Rice adaptations that AMC is producing in the form of Interview with the Vampire, The Mayfair Witches, and Talamasca. The videos presented at the event prominently and repeatedly features clips from the 1994 Interview movie adaptation (to the point of distraction almost) but literally nothing from the new shows. This is particularly odd since AMC’s Interview With The Vampire is widely acclaimed and an all-around excellent adaptation of the novel which one would think would be worthy of highlighting given how few of Rice’s works have actually made it to screen. Couple this with one of the speaker’s somewhat shady comment about how the fans should hope for “faithful” adaptations of Rice’s work, which was met with puzzling applause.
One can follow the sequence of events which lead to Interview ending up at AMC without Christopher Rice’s involvement whereas he had previously been attached as writer in previous iterations of the show as it was shopped different streamers around to his perhaps being unhappy with the final product. One can make a case that the show has taken some liberties with the story but it is an adaptation of the book, not the book itself. But that’s a topic for another day. Regardless, Rice rarely if ever publically comments on the AMC shows on which he is still nominally attached as a producer.
In any case, this was a lovely event to celebrate the unique life of an author who’s work touched her readers dearly. That much is clear from both the in-person testimonials and the short video excerpts sent in by readers. Her work reached people from all walks of life and inspired us and made us feel seen.
We will miss you dearly, Anne.
Note:
Personally, I fell off from reading some of her later books but that just means I have about a half dozen unread Anne Rice books to enjoy at my leisure (Including 3 Vampire Chronicles!) which makes them a precious commodity.
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