Anne Rice and Her Dark World

Her Books:

Rampling, Anne. Exit to Eden. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

Rice, Anne. Angel Time: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.

Rice, Anne. Belinda: A Novel. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

Rice, Anne. Blackwood Farm. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2002.

Rice, Anne. Blood Canticle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Rice, Anne. Blood and Gold, or, The Story of Marius. New York: Knopf, 2001.

Rice, Anne. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt : a Novel. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Rice, Anne. Cry to Heaven. New York: Knopf, 1982.

Rice, Anne. The Feast of All Saints. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1997.

Rice, Anne. Lasher: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Rice, Anne. Memnoch the Devil. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Rice, Anne. Merrick: A Novel. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2000.

Rice, Anne. The Mummy. London: Arrow, 2004.

Rice, Anne. The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989.

Rice, Anne. Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Rice, Anne. The Queen of the Damned. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Rice, Anne. The Road to Cana: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Rice, Anne. Servant of the Bones. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Rice, Anne. The Tale of the Body Thief. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Rice, Anne. Taltos: Lives of the Mayfair Witches. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Rice, Anne. The Vampire Armand. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Rice, Anne. The Vampire Chronicles Collection. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002.

Rice, Anne. The Vampire Lestat. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Rice, Anne. Violin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Rice, Anne. Vittorio, the Vampire: New Tales of the Vampires. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Rice, Anne. The Witching Hour: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Rice, Anne, and A. N. Roquelaure. Beauty's Punishment. London: Warner, 2001.

Rice, Anne, and A. N. Roquelaure. Beauty's Release. London: Warner, 2001.

Rice, Anne, and A. N. Roquelaure. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. London: Warner, 2001.

Biography:

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. "Interviewing the Author of Interview with the Vampire." Gothic Studies. 1.2 (1999): 169-81.

Ramsland, Katherine M. Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Dutton, 1991.

Rice, Anne. Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. [This is the autobiography of Anne Rice. I chose this one because if you want to find out any information about the author, it is best to get the truth from their own words. The truth might be stretched just to make them look good. However, I believe that a good writer does not need to lie in order to tell a good story.]

"Rice, Anne." Current Biography 52.7 (1991): 54. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Apr. 2010.

Rice, Anne, and Michael Riley. Conversations with Anne Rice. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. [This one was written with Anne Rice. This is a book of interviews. Once again, it is best to learn more about the writer from the writer themselves. Yet, the Riley might have edited some of her words in the book.]

Bibliography

Stephens, Christopher P. A Checklist of Anne Rice. Hastings-On-Hudson, NY: Ultramarine, 1991. [This is the only bibliography on Anne Rice that I could find. Due to the fact that Rice is considered “new” in the literary world, not many books on bibliography has been written yet. There is also the fast that she is still writing books. So, this is not really a complete bibliography as of right now.]

Criticism:

Antoni, Rita. "A Vampiric Relation to Feminism: The Monstrous-Feminine in Whitley Strieber's and Anne Rice's Gothic Fiction." Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary. 4.1 (2008): [no pagination]. [This looks at Rice’s books in a feministic light. It examines vampirism with a feminist’s point of view. It reminds me of all of the Mary Shelley comparisons. I will finally understand why.]

Beahm, George. The Unauthorized Anne Rice Companion. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1996.

Benefiel, Candace R. "Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire." Journal of Popular Culture. 38.2 (2004): 261-73. [Here is a look at the family of Lestat, Louis, and Claudia in Interview with a Vampire. This would also play into the queer theory due to the fact that Lestat and Louis played father to Claudia about she mentally grew up. Nice book to look at.]

Holmes, Trevor. "Becoming-Other: (Dis)Embodiments of Race in Anne Rice's Tale of the Body Thief." Romanticism on the Net: An Electronic Journal Devoted to Romantic Studies. 44 (2006): 20 paragraphs. [Here is a look into the novel Tale of the Body Thief. It seems to talk about race and becoming someone else. I really want to look more into Tale of the Body Thief more often.]

Chung, Debbie Joyce. "'Such Blood, Such Power': The Lot Complex in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire." Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies. 6.2 (2000): 173-81.

Doane, Janice, and Devon Hodges. "Undoing Feminism: From the Preoedipal to Postfeminism in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles." American Literary History. 2.3 (1990): 422-42.

Ferraro, Susan. "Novels You Can Sink Your Teeth Into." New York Times Magazine. (1990): 26-28, 67, 74-77.

Haggerty, George E. "Anne Rice and the Queering of Culture." Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 32.1 (1998): 5-18. [Looks at Rice’s work from a queer view. Her vampires have always been bisexual to me. There is something about that draws me without warning. It really makes me want to find out what makes them so attractive to both genders.]

Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne. The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. [This looks a religion and psychology in her books. I have a minor in psychology. I would really love to check this book out. Her characters have serious psychological problems that I would love to sink my teeth into.]

Jowett, Lorna. "'Mute and Beautiful': The Representation of the Female in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire." FEMSPEC: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Journal Dedicated to Critical and Creative Work in the Realms of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Magical Realism, Surrealism, Myth, Folklore, and Other Supernatural Genres. 4.1 (2002): 59-67.

Keller, James R., and Gwendolyn A. Morgan. Anne Rice and Sexual Politics: The Early Novels. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000. [This one explores the sexual side of her earlier novels. This book held my interest hostage from the beginning. I never knew that Rice wrote erotica. This book makes me want to know what’s inside.]

Kemppainen, Tatja. "Your Heart Bleeds for Me: Finding the Essential Human in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire." Moderna Språk. 94.2 (2000): 122-36.

King, Maureen. "Contemporary Women Writers and the 'New Evil': The Vampires of Anne Rice and Suzy McKee Charnas." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 5.3 [19] (1993): 75-84. [Looks at Rice and her vampires in a feminist point of view. This is puts Rice is the contemporary Gothic feminist category. I am slowly starting to understand Rice as a feminist. Maybe, this will help me understand it better.]

LaPerriere, Maureen C. "Triply Filiated: Lestat and the Three Fathers." Journal of Dracula Studies. 8 (2006): 30-36.

Lana, Victor. "Gothic Feminism in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles." Dissertation Abstracts International. 55.7 (1995): 1955A. <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:9433589>. [This looks at the feminism in Rice’s vampire chronicles. It is always about the boys in her stories. I am curious about the women and girls in the vampire chronicles. That would really grab my attention.]

Lash, Sarah. "Intellectualizing Smut: The Role of Tradition in Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty." Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies. 22.1 (2008): 67-76. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/marvels_and_tales/v022/22.1.lash.html>. [This book looks at how Rice eroticized the story of Sleeping Beauty in an earlier trilogy that she wrote. I really do want to read and look at her earlier works. They seem so interesting to me. What did she write before Interview with a Vampire?]

Marigny, Jean, and Victor Reinking. "The Different Faces of Eros in the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice." Para-Doxa. 1.3 (1995): 352-62.

O'Leary, Crystal L. "Transcending Monstrous Flesh: A Revision of the Hero's Mythic Quest." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. 13.3 [51] (2003): 239-49.

Raileanu, Nicoleta Maria. "The Social and Psychological Relevance of Anne Rice's 'Queen of the Damned' and 'Pandora' in the Context of Gothic Tradition." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences. 60.4 (1999): 1126. <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:9924917>.

Ramsland, Katherine M., and Anne Rice. The Witches' Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. [This book looks at the Mayfair Witches in Rice’s Witches chronicles. I have only read a little bit of Blackwood Farm. I really want to dig into the Mayfair witches and learn more about them. They sound just as good as the vampires.]

Roberts, Bette B. Anne Rice. Twayne's United States authors series, TUSAS 644. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Rout, Kay Kinsella. "The Least of These: Exploitation in Anne Rice's Mayfair Trilogy." Journal of American Culture. 19.4 (1996): 87-93.

Rout, Kathleen. "Who Do You Love? Anne Rice's Vampires and Their Moral Transition." Journal of Popular Culture. 36.3 (2003): 473-79. [This source asks a strong question. It looks at the morale in Rice’s vampires. Rice has always played with the darkness in her stories. But, why do they love?]

Rzepa, Agnieszka. "Neither in nor out: A Lover of Witches: Androgyny in American Popular Culture: A Case Study." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An International Review of English Studies. 34 (1999): 355-68.

Shelton, Melinda L. "From Garden to Jungle." Lambda Book Report: A Review of Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Literature. 9.3 (2000): 6-9.

Skrip, Jack. "I Drink, Therefore I Am: Introspection in the Contemporary Vampire Novel." StWF. 14 (1994): 3-7.

Smith, Jennifer. Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Critical companions to popular contemporary writers. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996. [Here is a nice book on a critical look at Rice’s books. This would help a fan getting into her works. I feel this would lay out the basics for anyone. It’s good to have a good start to anything.]

Sonser, Anna M. "Subversion, Seduction, and the Culture of Consumption: The American Gothic Revisited in the Work of Toni Morrision, Joyce Carol Oates, and Anne Rice." Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: The Humanities and Social Sciences. 61.1 (2000): 186.

Tomc, Sandra. "Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire." English Studies in Canada. 22.4 (1996): 441-60.

Waxman, Barbara Frey. "Postexistentialism in the Neo-Gothic Mode: Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 25.3 (1992): 79-97.

Ziv, Amalia. "The Pervert's Progress: An Analysis of Story of O and the Beauty Trilogy." Feminist Review. 46 (1994): 61-75.

My Thoughts of Anne Rice’s Dark World

Vampires have been a part of the world of literature since Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They have been cast with different features to their personalities. Vampires can be ugly and evil or sexy and charming. Everyone just cannot get enough of these powerful, blood-drinking creatures of the night. One of the writers to thank for making vampires so wildly popular is the writer, Anne Rice. She had charmed the world with characters such as Lestat, Armand, Marcus, and all of the like. Rice fans know her stories inside and out. She has established herself in the vampire pop culture world. However, Rice does not just write about vampires. She has written about witches, BDSM, and even about Jesus Christ. Anne Rice is one of my favorite writers. There is just so much that I want to find out about her. This is why I have created this annotated bibliography all about her. As I started this project, I was amazed to have learned so much about her by looking up different sources about her work.

I personally love all of Anne Rice’s works. I think she has done an amazing job with writing over the years. She inspires me with my own writing. I have never known her books to be read all over the world or to have so much research done to them. All of the sources I have picked out break down her books piece by piece. Rice’s books draw the reader into a deep and dark seductive world. One thing I have noticed many times is that she has been compared to Mary Shelley and the book, Frankenstein. That would make sense to me. They both write in the Gothic novel genre. Shelley wrote about a monster being created from dead human parts while Rice writes about vampires, witches, and a mummy. It would appear that Rice and Shelley could be grouped in the same category as Gothic female writer. Rice truly does seem to fit into the Gothic romantic genre. Her books lure the reader into a heavy dark charm to them. It’s so powerful that one can even think about turning away. The deeper one reads, the more he or she has to have more of Rice’s stories.

Rice’s books can be analyzed in many different ways. To me, the best ways would psychoanalytic, feminism, queer, and cultural. I pick psychoanalytic because I want to get inside of her characters’ heads. Rice does an amazing job of making them so convincing. In her vampire chronicles for example, she tells the stories from first person point of view. This invites the reader into the lovely monsters’ heads in each book. Through their eyes and the stories that they tell, the read learns about their past lives, relationships, and how they became vampires. The most famous of her vampires is Lestat. There is so much that I want to analyze about him. The top one is through psychoanalysis. Lestat is a complex package. He is a walking paradox in Rice’s books. On the one hand, he is my ideal vampire: sensual, charming, ambitious, and pretty wild. But yet, he is sadistic, cold, and really possessive. Lestat is just like Bram Stoker’s Dracula in mainstream pop culture. However, this is only on the surface. There is more to Lestat that causes the reader to empathize with him in every adventure of the vampire chronicles. Despite being a vampire, there still seems to be a little bit of human to him. Why does he do the things that he does in the stories? What does he truly desire? I really want to see Freud answer those questions about Lestat. That would look rather interesting to me. For, I think that Lestat is more id-driven with his lovers, interests, and the need to drink blood. However, the need for drinking blood can be argued to be a survival instinct as well. It is well-known that vampires survive by drinking blood. Yet, Lestat just kills for the thrill of it. So, that would look like he lives by his id and his survival instincts among the humans. The list can just go on from there with Lestat and the other vampires in the Vampire Chronicles through a psychoanalytic study.

I never really thought that Rice’s works can be looked through in a feministic way. The readers hear mostly about Lestat, Marius, Armand, and the rest of the boys in the Vampire Chronicles. But what about the female vampires in the stories? Rice reads about Pandora, Gabrielle, Claudia, Maharet and Mekare, and Akasha. These women may not be noticed that much, but they still play an important role in the stories. Maharet, Mekare, and Akasha all play mother to the vampire race. The women in Rice’s books all seem to play a mother-figure of some sort. Claudia, after she grew up mentally, acts somewhat of a mother towards Louis in a cruel way after she tries to kill Lestat out of jealousy. Her love for Louis seems to be a one of an Electra complex. Another mother-son relationship that is reflect if not briefly is between Gabrielle and Lestat. Gabrielle is Lestat’s biological mother. He loved her so much that as she was dying, he turned her into vampire. Going along with feminism study, I have also noticed that Shelley and Rice have been classified in the category of Gothic feminism writing. I cannot really understand why. I really want a clearer explanation on it works out for them both. One reason I could take an educated guess with is that they are both writing about taboo subjects in a sense. Shelley wrote about science and playing God with life and death in Frankenstein. Rice is challenging religion in her books Memnoch the Devil and the rest of the Vampire Chronicles. However, she did not stop there. Rice is currently working on a trilogy about Jesus. This has caused shock among her fans and everyone. Personally, this has caught my attention. Both women have and are succeeding in the eyes of feminists by proving it is okay for women to write about conversional subjects and get away with it. If men can do it, why not women?

Another good theory is queer analysis. All of Rice’s vampires are bisexual. It is easy to see why. When creatures are in human forms live for a long time, they become lonely pretty easily. Any gender will look good to them. Rice’s vampires are no exception to this rule. There are many homosexual relationships between the vampires. I have noticed that there are some people that are attracted to same-sex romance stories. It is seems hard to understand at first. However in reality, there are so many reasons that it is exactly hard to pin it down. One reason is that homoeroticism seems like a dirty guilty pleasure. Rice seems to supply her reads with just that very thing. However, the vampires cannot physically have sex. A few years ago, I read that the reason is because their genitals are badly damaged with like a corpse’s. This little fact would ruin everything. However, the blood-drinking itself replaces the sex in the Vampires Chronicles. Rice crafts it so well that the mere act itself seems erotic for hetero and homo couples. Also, Rice does not focus merely on homoeroticism between her couples. There is also seems a love in a rather twisted sense between. This love is so corrupt most of the time that it seems to come really close towards obsession. There have been plenty of temptations in her books. One example is the book, Blood and Gold. Marius is tempted to turn the painter, Botticelli, into a vampire after a devil in his head tempts him to do so. He almost does it, but the painting of Jesus being crucified stops him in his tracks and just drops the whole plan after that. Then, there is a dark side to the homosexual love in Rice’s stories. She makes her characters just as flawed as humans. They do experience jealousy and cruel ways of love to their lovers. It all makes for a powerful story that no one can stop reading until the way end. Next to psychoanalytic theory, queer theory is the best way to go studying Rice’s novels.

The final study is cultural. Rice’s novels all have some sort of cultural thrown into them. Most of the Mayfair Witch and Vampire chronicles are set in New Orleans. Her work is heavily associated with the city because of it. The house where the movie version of her novel, Interview with a Vampire is now a popular tourist spot. One critic even wrote about Rice’s use of New Orleans in a book. But, the city is not the only powerful cultural reference in the book. Jesus and religion are also heavily flooded in her books. She was once a Catholic, but then left the church a few years back. In 2004, Rice became a Catholic again. The way she writes about Jesus and God in her books is dark, but highly attractive. In Memnoch the Devil, Rice made God and the Devil flawed to the point that it caused controversy. In this same book, Hell was not a place of eternal damnation. It is more like Purgatory. The use of Jesus does not stop there, however. Anne Rice is currently writing about the life of Jesus in a trilogy. I think her views on religious match the type of stories during her time period. It all calls for a closer look into the way she writes about God and Jesus in her books.

Anne Rice is an amazing writer. She has captured the whole world with her own dark, cold, seductive world. There are many books trying to figure her out. However, the work will never be done. Rice’s dark world just keeps on growing and growing. All her fans and critics can do is the try and keep up with her.