{"id":1112418,"date":"2021-12-12T18:43:50","date_gmt":"2021-12-12T23:43:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1112418"},"modified":"2021-12-12T18:43:54","modified_gmt":"2021-12-12T23:43:54","slug":"anne-rice-novelist-who-breathed-new-life-into-vampires-dies-at-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/anne-rice-novelist-who-breathed-new-life-into-vampires-dies-at-80\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Rice, Novelist Who Breathed New Life into Vampires, Dies at 80"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fanne-rice-novelist-who-breathed-new-life-into-vampires-dies-at-80%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1112418&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p class=\"subheading\">NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/anne-rice\">Anne Rice<\/a>, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic tales, including \u201cInterview With a Vampire,\u201d reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She was 80.<\/p>\n<p>Rice died late Saturday due to complications from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice announced on her Facebook page and his Twitter page.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"D-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"gmxrevmore\" class=\"H\"><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cAs a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions,\u201d Christopher Rice, also an author, wrote. \u201cIn her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rice\u2019s 1976 novel \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d was later adapted, with a script by Rice, into the 1994 movie directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It\u2019s also set <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/anne-rice-entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-75912861a90c475b3e20b610d3744f29\">to be adapted again in an upcoming TV series<\/a> on AMC and AMC+ set to premiere next year.<\/p>\n<p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Interview With the Vampire (1994) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sCmYN6TLd8A?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B2\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<p>\u201cInterview With the Vampire,\u201d in which reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, was Rice\u2019s first novel but over the next five decades, she would write more than 30 books and sell more than 150 million copies worldwide. Thirteen of those were part of the \u201cVampire Chronicles\u201d begun with her 1976 debut. Long before \u201cTwilight\u201d or \u201cTrue Blood,\u201d Rice introduced sumptuous romance, female sexuality and queerness \u2014 many took \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d as an allegory for homosexuality \u2014 to the supernatural genre.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI wrote novels about people who are shut out life for various reasons,\u201d Rice wrote in her 2008 memoir \u201cCalled Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.\u201d \u201cThis became a great theme of my novels \u2014 how one suffers as an outcast, how one is shut out of various levels of meaning and, ultimately, out of human life itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Born Howard Allen Frances O\u2019Brien in 1941, she was raised in New Orleans, where many of her novels were set. Her father worked for the postal service but made sculptures and wrote fiction on the side. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, also wrote fantasy and horror fiction. Rice\u2019s mother died when Rice was 15.<\/p>\n<p>Raised in an Irish Catholic family, Rice initially imagined herself becoming a priest (before she realized women weren\u2019t allowed) or a nun. Rice often wrote about her fluctuating spiritual journey. In 2010, she announced that she was no longer Christian, saying \u201cI refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_19103738\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" readability=\"37\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/AP120422067724.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-19103738\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/AP120422067724.jpg\" alt=\"Anne Rice attends LA Times Festival of Books, Sun, April. 22, 2012, at the USC Campus in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996, attracting more than 140,000 book enthusiasts each year.(AP Photo\/Katy Winn)\" width=\"1024\" height=\"666\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Anne Rice attends LA Times Festival of Books, Sun, April. 22, 2012, at the USC Campus in Los Angeles. (AP Photo\/Katy Winn)<\/em><\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B3\" class=\"a8d adSo\"><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cI believed for a long time that the differences, the quarrels among Christians didn\u2019t matter a lot for the individual, that you live your life and stay out of it. But then I began to realize that it wasn\u2019t an easy thing to do,\u201d Rice told The Associated Press then. \u201cI came to the conclusion that if I didn\u2019t make this declaration, I was going to lose my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rice married the poet Stan Rice, who died in 2002, in 1961. They lived amid the bohemian scene of Haight-Ashbury in 1960s San Francisco where Rice described herself as \u201ca square,\u201d typing away and studying writing at San Francisco State University while everyone else partied. Together they had two children: Christopher and Michelle, who died of leukemia at 5 in 1972.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"D-ROS-B2\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<p>It was while grieving Michelle\u2019s death that Rice wrote \u201cInterview With the Vampire,\u201d turning one of her short stories into a book. Rice traced her fascination with vampires back to the 1934 film, \u201cDracula\u2019s Daughter,\u201d which she saw as a young girl.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI never forgot that film,\u201d Rice <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/anne-rice-opens-up-i-feel-like-im-gay\">told the Daily Beast in 2016.<\/a> \u201cThat was always my impression of what vampires were: earthlings with heightened sensibility and a doomed appreciation of life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Though Rice had initially struggled to get it published, \u201cInterview With a Vampire\u201d was a massive hit, particularly in paperback. She didn\u2019t immediately extend the story, following it up with a pair of historical novels and three erotic novels penned under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. But in 1985, she published \u201cThe Vampire Lestat,\u201d about the \u201cInterview With a Vampire\u201d character she would continually return to, up to 2018\u2019s \u201cBlood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B4\" class=\"a8d adSo\"><\/figure>\n<p>In Rice\u2019s \u201cVampire Chronicles,\u201d some critics saw only cheap eroticism. But others \u2014 including millions of readers \u2014 saw the most consequential interpretation of vampires since Bram Stoker.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLet me suggest one reason why the books found a mass audience. They were written by someone whose auditory and visual experiences shaped the prose,\u201d Rice wrote in her memoir. \u201cI am a terrible reader. But my mind is filled with these auditory and visual lessons and, powered by them, I can write about five times faster than I can read.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rice\u2019s longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, recalled her as \u201ca fierce storyteller who wrote large, lived quietly, and imagined worlds on a grand scale.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cShe summoned the feelings of an age long before we knew what they were,\u201d Wilson said in a statement. \u201cAs a writer, she was decades ahead of her time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rice will be interred during a private ceremony at a family mausoleum in New Orleans, her family said. A public celebration will also be planned for next year in New Orleans. \u201cRamses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris,\u201d a novel Rice wrote with her son Christopher, will be published in February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic tales, including \u201cInterview With a Vampire,\u201d reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She was 80. &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1112418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}