The Vampire Novelist Next Door
Anne Rice in Palm Desert
When you picture a California writer ensconced in her Berkeley bungalow, bathed in the afternoon light, you do not generally picture her writing about night-crawling creatures who suck people’s blood and dump their withered bodies in stoves and swamps. But in 1973, in a bleary five-week sprint in her garden apartment in North Berkeley, Anne Rice wrote Interview With the Vampire, which would go on to sell more than 25 million copies and inspire a litany of popular vampire franchises. Reeling from the recent death of her 5-year-old daughter, Michele, from leukemia, Rice channeled an 18th-century vampire who feeds on a 5-year-old girl in order to turn her into an immortal companion.
While the book is in many ways a love letter to New Orleans, where Rice grew up, she’s actually spent nearly 40 of her 73 years in California. Today, she is settled in a one-story stucco-and-tile rental in Palm Desert, surrounded by golf courses and retirees. Her house is indistinguishable from the others on her gated community’s wide asphalt drive, punctuated by palm trees and postage-stamp front lawns. “I would not have liked it when I was very young. It would have been suburban, boring,” she says. “But for me, right now, this is a great place to be.”
It’s certainly a departure from the four-columned antebellum mansion Rice purchased after moving back to New Orleans in 1988. The Garden District house became a local landmark, and Rice famous for her prodigious collections of dolls and Christian iconography, her wardrobe full of Victorian lace blouses, and her proclivity to show up to book signings in a coffin carted by a hearse and accompanied by a second-line funeral procession. But here in the desert, almost all traces of that persona have vanished. She wears white cotton and sensible shoes and spends her mornings updating her Facebook page. With the exception of a small display of religious statuary and long taper candles that are lighted in the middle of the day, her home is decorated in what might be called Grandmother in Repose (though she is not, in fact, a grandmother): books spilling from shelves, faded family photos on walls, stuffed animals nestled in armchairs, an exercise bike in a corner.
This month, Rice is releasing Prince Lestat, the 11th installment of her Vampire Chronicles series and the first in 11 years. She finished Blood Canticle, her last vampire book, while her husband, Stan, was dying of brain cancer in their New Orleans home. He had been the inspiration for the central vampire, Rice says, “so I guess I associated Lestat with loss and pain and grief. And I needed time to heal from that.”
She fled New Orleans for Southern California — first La Jolla, then the desert — to be close to her son, Christopher, who works as a screenwriter and novelist in Los Angeles. California still carried the promise of her college years, when she lived a block off Haight Street during the Summer of Love, and her time in Berkeley, when she and Stan were “constantly mistaken for hippies.”
In New Orleans, Rice’s Irish Catholic family includes “easily a thousand cousins,” people whose lifestyles and accents have been handed down over generations, she says, sipping a mini-can of caffeine-free Diet Coke, which her assistant fetches from a rolling ice chest that Rice takes with her from room to room. “In California, almost all of us have an acquired lifestyle: We came here to have it. You know what I mean? To be a writer, to be a bohemian, to put our art and our liberal ideas before, say, pleasing our cousins.”
After Stan’s death, Rice, an on-and-off Catholic, put the paranormal on hold in order to focus on a series of novels from the point of view of a young Jesus Christ. But in 2010, she renounced organized Christianity, citing its positions on science, gender, and sexuality. (Christopher is gay, and Rice’s novels are multi-directionally erotic — and, in the case of her Sleeping Beauty trilogy, straight-up pornographic.)
She dedicates Prince Lestat to Stan, Michele, and Christopher, as well as to Jon Bon Jovi, whom she adores. “I was listening to him this morning — the bathroom was just trembling in there with him,” she says, pronouncing his name with a French lilt, the emphasis on the second syllable in “Jovi.”
Compared to the grief-addled Interview, the new book is a raucous, globe-trotting reunion of all of Rice’s most popular vampires. Thrown into the present day, they struggle with how to lead morally defensible lives, and also with their iPhones. “At the darkest moments, you just don’t think the light’s gonna come back on,” Rice says. “But one of the things that happens when you do heal is that you get back — at least I did, fortunately — an optimism that you thought was impossible to regain.”
She’s long wanted to see more of her work onscreen, so she’s been taking meetings in Los Angeles, where she keeps a pied-à-terre just off Sunset Boulevard. In August, Universal Pictures acquired the rights to all the Vampire Chronicles novels, progenitors as they are to Twilight, True Blood, et al. Rice enjoys these variations on the vampire theme — “I’ll miss Sookie and Bill,” she says of the True Blood finale, which she’d watched on an 80-inch screen in her bedroom just a few days before. She describes their approach, not unkindly, as “the vampire next door.”
“I believe very much in writing about the vampire as a hero, as a survivor,” she says. “Somebody that could comment on the world, and suffering, from the standpoint of enlightenment that immortality had given him.”
Of all her characters, Rice identifies most with Lestat, who reinvents himself time and again and revels in seducing his victims. “I was never a domesticator of the vampire,” she says, dabbing her lips with a white linen napkin.