10/31/00 - Washington Post " She loves it that readers love her fiction; she does not, however, love a genre known as "fan fiction." Anne's peculiar settings and recurring characters have sparked a new Internet-driven form--readers take her characters and make up new stories about them.
"I don't like fan fiction," she says. "If I ever read it, I would block completely." She suggests that aspiring writers who must crib from other authors "take someone who is in the public domain--Ahab, Ishmael, David Copperfield." Not her characters.
"I'm still young," she says. "I haven't finished with Lestat."
NEW ORLEANS –– Every day, as the sun sets, Anne Rice feels the panic coming on. It's not despair. It's not malaise. It's an anxiousness that things are not quite right. She doesn't fear the night. Or the day. It's that in-between time that concerns her.
She calls it twilight anxiety.
"Anguish comes over me in the early evening," she says. "I don't know what it all means." The weirdness is something she's been battling since childhood. Even as a little girl, she rued the post-sunset somberness, the dread-dusk moments between light and dark.
For years she has pondered the origins of her primordial pain. A chemical reaction to light, she suggests. Something in her past?
Or is it something in the blood?
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For Rice, it's all about the blood.
In "Merrick," for instance, her new novel published this week, the vampire Lestat tells David--another vampire--that "we might compare rituals the world over in all religions and all systems of magic, forever, but they always involve blood. Why? Of course I know that human beings can not live without blood; I know that 'the blood is the life,' saith Dracula; I know that humankind speaks in cries and whispers of blood-drenched altars, of bloodshed and blood kin, and blood will have blood, and those of the finest blood."
Blood is important to Rice in real life, too.
She is driven to write by the memory of her father and mother, and the 5-year-old daughter she lost to leukemia. "I have a memory that's merciless," she says.
She's had it worse since her brush with death two years ago.
"I came within five minutes of dying," says Rice, who lapsed into a diabetic coma in 1998 when her blood sugar level went haywire. She survived and "Merrick" is the book she wrote to bring herself back into the land of the living.
For two years she crafted the novel, which melds two of Rice's favorite subjects--witches and vampires. The character Merrick Mayfair, who appeared in Rice's "Mayfair Witches" series, encounters Rice's notorious vampires--Lestat, Louis and David.
Today Anne Rice is feeling good. "My blood sugar is under good control," she says.
Her painterly husband, Stan, is nearby, talking with another man. And her 22-year-old son, Christopher, is back at home after promoting his first novel, "A Density of Souls." It's a novel of death and deception among a clique of New Orleans teenagers.
Anne was 37 when Christopher was born. She feels like her son's grandmother. She is devoted to him.
"He led us back into the world," she says. "He said, 'Let's go here; let's go there.' At one point he developed a passion for rooftop restaurants. He got us out of the house."
The writer still likes hanging out at home. The Rice Family Mansion is a great gray thing, looming over the southeast corner of First and Chestnut in the lush, lovely Garden District. Inside, high ceilings rise over plush sofas and hardwood floors. There's a playful quality: Stan's exotic expressionist paintings, full of blood-red and dark-blue creatures, take up much of the wall space. And there is a religiosity: icons and statuettes and large carvings of an arrow-filled Saint Sebastian and a child-carrying Saint Anthony.
And she loves New Orleans--the most European city in America--with its ghostly Spanish moss dangling from long-limbed live oaks and its spice-scented air of deliquescent charm. There's a delightful decadence to the city, as if it's an earthly purgatory, a halfway point between the good warm life and the long cold death.
As Rice speaks, she shifts uncomfortably on a sofa in her impressive book-filled library. "I've been overweight all my adult life," she says. She has brown eyes and grayish-brown hair cut in bangs above big round glasses. She is wearing her traditional darkwear--black jacket, black blouse, an orange-and-black scarf, black crushed-velvet skirt, black shoes. And, perhaps because of chapping, there seems to be a drop of dried blood on her lip.
She is an American institution. She's been churning out hot-selling books since 1976, when she published her first blockbuster: "Interview With the Vampire." She has also written some extremely erotic novels under pseudonyms, including a trio of books about the sexual escapades of Sleeping Beauty. Mostly, she says, "I write about my fears, things I am afraid of."
Anne Rice is also an industry. She has 48 folks working for her at her home, at her other house around the corner, at her doll museum in the old St. Elizabeth's Orphanage nearby and in her shop at the strip mall down the street.
Twice a day, she leaves the house--to eat. She usually has lunch at Ruth's Chris Steak House. She orders the petit filet mignon, well done, and the potatoes. One of her favorite places for dinner is Vincent's on St. Charles.
Her fans leave her alone, she says. "Nothing bad has ever happened."
Well, there was that time in 1996 that the so-called "vampire cult"--a group of bloodthirsty teens from Kentucky--headed for New Orleans after committing a bloody double murder in Florida. Authorities told reporters that the group might have chosen the Crescent City because of the novels of Anne Rice. "Queen of the Damned" was found in the car of a slain couple. One of the suspects said she was going to New Orleans to meet the writer.
Asked about these episodes, Rice is eerily oblivious. She says she enjoys meeting her readers. Sometimes she steps outside to speak to tour groups.
Rice used to run a tour of her own. Then in 1997, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile of her that Rice feels was overly critical. She was not running tours for self-aggrandizement, she says, she was just creating jobs. She closed the tours down. "These things are totally losing propositions for me," she says.
It's not always easy being Anne Rice.
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Or Anne Rice's son.
At a recent book-signing in Washington, he reads from "Density," then fields a batch of questions from the audience, composed mostly of young gay men.
There is an ethereal quality to Christopher. He's a tall drink of water, with light hair, fair skin and blue eyes. He wears button-down shirts, jeans. A flier thumbtacked to the wall says: "Christopher Rice, the son of Anne Rice."
Someone asks him if it helps or hurts that his mother is so well known. "It opens the door," he says, speaking softly, "but it doesn't push me through it."
He likes his novel, he says, because "the gay boy gets the football player."
There is laughter.
"I took all my worst fears in high school and made them all happen to one character," Chris says.
Near the end of the evening, a guy raises his hand and asks a simple question. He also reveals one of the book's plot twists. Two lovers, it turns out, are half brothers. Chris winces when the secret is given away. "There are plenty more secrets," he assures the gathering.
"My mother," he tells the group, "thinks it's beautiful that they're half brothers. My father thinks it's disgusting."
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Stan Rice is too shy to chat. He waves awkwardly when his wife inadvertently runs into him as she gives a reporter a tour of the house.
But Chris is home on a Friday the 13th with a full moon. So New Orleans. He sits for a while in the library with his mother. He's in T-shirt and jeans. He smokes a lot of cigarettes.
"We always told him," Anne says of her son, "be honorable and honest and reach for the stars. Try new things. Be adventurous."
She laughs. "He did drag us to Wes Craven movies. I was horrified."
When his mother got sick, Chris moved home from San Francisco to be near her. He is still living with his parents, but he wants a place of his own. Soon.
In the same way that Anne used "Interview With the Vampire" to help get over her daughter's death, Chris began writing "Density of Souls" to deal with his mother's near-death experience. "I had to have a world I could control," he says.
Oddly enough, he says, his characters are less likable than his mother's. His New Orleans is in some ways more dangerous than her city of supernatural strangeness.
"We grew up in two different New Orleanses," he says. "I saw a world of uptown affluence, a world that cannot deal with differences."
His mother sees a lovely, unearthly city, full of death and decay. "It cannot support the thirst of three vampires," she writes in "Merrick."
Death is all around in New Orleans. Rice says, "Someone told Chris that a previous owner of this house had shot himself at the foot of those stairs. They thought nothing of it."
Asked if she was ever concerned that her son might read her sexually explicit books, Rice says, "You write what you have to write." Chris chimes in, "I still haven't read the 'Beauty' books."
"They're not for everyone," his mother says.
Rice is a big fan of her son's first novel. "I was impressed with his large cast of characters. I thought he wrote a big book."
His next novel is about a mysterious disappearance on a college campus.
Chris plans to stay in New Orleans for a while. He moves in a tight circle of friends, mostly buds from his work in local theaters.
He'll be in town for the election.
"I excuse my apathy," he says, "because the president is basically a powerless figurehead. Being an out gay man, I have friends who are Log Cabin Republicans. I think they are fools. I can't even look at George Bush. He's the worst kind of ego-inflated frat boy."
Gore is not perfect either, Chris says, "but I will be voting for him."
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Chris comes by his politics naturally.
His mom is a 24-7 Democrat. Rice just sent a check for $10,000 to a Democratic committee organized to take back the House of Representatives. Last year she threw a big shindig for Louisiana congressman William Jefferson.
"Clinton came," she says, "and walked through Stan's gallery."
She will return to New Orleans to vote for Al Gore on Nov. 7. "I can't imagine George W. as the leader of the free world," she says. "I'm not even sure George W. wants to be president."
The queen of vampires adds: "I'm chilled. I'm frightened by George W."
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Rice's next novel, already finished, will be called "Blood and Gold." It's the story of Marius, a vampire. The one after that will be another book about Lestat.
Now, though, she's savoring the publication of "Merrick" and the book tour that begins this week. (She will be at the Seventh Street Olsson's tonight.) "I'm hungry for this one," she says. "It's been years since I've seen my readers."
She keeps in touch with them through a meticulously kept Web site, AnneRice.com. She loves it that readers love her fiction; she does not, however, love a genre known as "fan fiction." Anne's peculiar settings and recurring characters have sparked a new Internet-driven form--readers take her characters and make up new stories about them.
"I don't like fan fiction," she says. "If I ever read it, I would block completely." She suggests that aspiring writers who must crib from other authors "take someone who is in the public domain--Ahab, Ishmael, David Copperfield." Not her characters.
"I'm still young," she says. "I haven't finished with Lestat."
She doesn't discourage young people from adopting some of the ways of the vampire. She understands the romantic allure. "Cities these days are awfully secular, materialistic, sterile," she says.
But "drinking another person's blood is dangerous," she says, "because there are so many diseases out there such as AIDS."
She says she has never met a real blood-drinker. She did, however, see a TV show on real people who act like vampires. "I thought it was pretty horrible," she says.
Just about every weekday she gets up at 9, drinks coffee, reads the newspaper, watches CNN, takes a bath, gets dressed, goes to the first-floor room where she runs the conglomerate that is Anne Rice.
She discusses movie deals with her business folks and marketing ideas with her publicity people. She signs books and answers reader mail.
Most of her writing is done on the weekends. She takes a break every Saturday evening, at twilight, for Mass at her parish church.
"I reconciled with the church," she says, "before the diabetic coma." When she dies, she would like to be buried in nearby Lafayette Cemetery. "I want to be laid out in the parlor," she says, "with only white flowers." She wants the congregation to sing "I Am the Bread of Life."
Then she wants a Dixieland jazz send-off.
