A VAMPIRE’S BEST FRIEND : Author of ‘Chronicles’ Finds New Blood Lines Back in New Orleans

With so many politicians in town, it seemed an appropriate time to talk about vampires.

There are, of course, certain inarguable similarities: A sense that each is bigger than life itself; an obsession with immortality; the arrogant notion that power is theirs to challenge, to conquer, to control.

But Anne Rice, whose “Vampire Chronicles” adds its third volume on Oct. 31 with the publication of “The Queen of the Damned” (Alfred A. Knopf), has such scant use for politicians that she blithely ignored the entire bacchanal of the Republican convention that all but consumed the rest of this city this week. Frankly, she ranks politicians right alongside movie producers, “the most underqualified people in the world.”

As for vampires, “they are really mythic images,” Rice said. This creature, the vampire, “has to renew itself nightly. It is life and death and the seasons. It has to kill to embrace life.” An image like that, said Rice, achieves every politician’s dream, “a huge impact.”

Stepping out into the heavy, humid air here, standing on a street filled with high-ceilinged houses at least a century old, a follower of the supernatural coterie that populates Rice’s ongoing collection may experience a curious sense of deja vu.

New Orleans Is Setting

Much of Rice’s first book, “Interview With the Vampire,” was set in New Orleans and its environs, and in its successor, “The Vampire Lestat,” some in the ghoulish gang pay homage to the Southern blood that still courses through them. Again, in “The Queen of the Damned,” ongoing characters Louis and Lestat return to this land of Spanish moss and shabby gentility. When the reader returns with them, it is like going home, back to, to use a dangerously vampirical image, the old familiar haunts.

Rice, too, came back to her home turf when she moved her family from San Francisco to her native neighborhood last month. Just six blocks from “the river,” the local understatement for the mighty Mississippi, the house they bought in the Garden District lies just around the corner from where Rice’s great-grandfather grew up, and only a few blocks from where Rice herself lived until she was 15.

Bought with what Rice calls “movie money” (options for the vampire books for movies yet to be made), the Rices’ “new” house was built in 1859. Outside, it is painted the color of some lush tropical fruit, a hue that seems to have grown up naturally in this steamy region. A glorious swirling staircase leads to Rice’s work space in a second-floor bedroom (“so easy; you can work in your nightgown”). Wide plank floors of rich wood are covered with Persian rugs, and in the dining room a splendid Queen Anne dining set is testimony to the Rices’ recent antique shopping spree, another benefit of the author’s cozy relationship with Hollywood.

The house is air-conditioned icebox cool. Open the door to the made-for-sitting-on front porch and the quality the Rices love most about New Orleans comes rushing in.

“The air!” 10-year-old Christopher Rice exclaimed, explaining why he has yet to be homesick for chilly San Francisco. Chris, wearing a New Orleans Saints T-shirt, has been in this city barely one month. Already his speech has traces of the local cadence. “Air,” when he utters it, is a two-syllable word. In this very neighborhood, Anne Rice began dreaming the dreams and battling the demons that would evolve into “The Vampire Chronicles.” She holed up as a teen-ager in the public library, inhaling stories of the English horror writers of the 19th Century.

“I used to love the stuff,” she remembered, sitting now at her oak kitchen table, alternately wearing and removing the black-framed glasses she bought at the drugstore to use while she works at her computer. Rice was too young, too unsophisticated then to know there was even a genre called horror writing. “I didn’t even know how to ask for the stuff,” she said. “I mean, I used to go in and say, ‘I want beautiful writing with big houses and lots of creepy stuff.’ ”

She discovered vampires. “They were romantic, so evil and seductive. They were beautiful, doomed aristocrats. I wanted to be one.”

Flees the Church

But while she was vicariously traveling to manors in the English countryside, Rice was wrestling with the crisis of faith that sent her fleeing from the Catholic Church at age 18. It also formed the foundation for her fascination with ritual, with spirits who swirl in and out of her writing. Still an exile from the church, Rice nonetheless acknowledges the influence of her youthful religious indoctrination.

“When you grow up a Catholic like I did in New Orleans, going to Mass every day in the cathedral, you have the impact of those myths,” she said. Every day, from the age of 4 to 15, Rice and her grandmother went to the Shrine of the Perpetual Help. She was educated by nuns, in classes where boys and girls were segregated. In her writing, she realizes that at some level, “you are trying to decode and to demystify the stuff you grew up with.”

At another stratum, Rice still struggles with her anger toward the church. In her lower middle-class circle, “the only options were being a wife and a nun,” Rice said. Then, “To get out of high school and not know who Faulkner and Hemingway were, I was really angry.” After her family moved to Texas when she was 15, “I remember going to the bookstore in Denton and looking at all those wonderful names like Kirkegaard. I thought, how will I ever understand all this?”

Ritual and Mythology

Rice was well into her 30s when she began reinventing the ritual of her religion, mixing it with the mythology she was stunned to discover predated Roman Catholicism by thousands of years when she finally read Joseph Campbell and Gordon Frazier. By then she had married her high school sweetheart, Stan Rice, the poet whose work links the chapters in “Queen of the Damned.” They had moved to San Francisco, worked their ways through college. Stan Rice had sped into the tenure track as a professor at San Francisco State.

Something else happened. In 1972, the Rices lost their 6-year-old daughter Michelle to an adult form of leukemia that seldom afflicts children.

One year later Rice showed up at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference with a manuscript in her suitcase, “Interview With the Vampire.” There she met a literary agent who swiftly sold the work to Knopf.

Not, however, before another publisher rejected “Interview,” blasting it as, at best, potential paperback pulp that “lacked writing finesse, plot and character.”

Sleeping in Coffins

Many critics still fail to take seriously Rice’s rollicking crew of blood drinkers. They wave away the rock star Lestat, the introspective Louis. Who cares, these scholarly reviewers ask, about creatures who sleep in coffins?

At first, Rice said, “I had been very hurt by the dismissal.” Reasoning that “immortals have to have something interesting to say to one another,” Rice sought from the beginning to create intricate characters, vampires, if such a notion does not seem too outrageous, who were the kind of characters readers might like to have at dinner, and possibly vice versa. Often to the chagrin of editors who wanted to truncate her prose, she labored over her descriptions and dialogue.

“My characters, to use Tennessee Williams’ phrase, are peculiar talkers,” Rice said.

The legacy of her love for British writers influenced her as positively as her antipathy for the Catholic Church did negatively.

“One of the things I have attempted to do in these books was to craft something that would satisfy people who like to read 19th-Century literature,” she said. “I’m not saying I’m one of the Bronte sisters.” But if the modern command of minimalist editors is “cut, cut, cut,” Rice said, and if editors fault her for writing too long, “I say all my books are too long.”

‘Just Keep at It’

Rice still longs for the credibility of writers like Alice Adams or Diane Johnson. “I mean, Anne Tyler, John Updike far exceed me,” she said. But she has learned to look beyond painful reviews and, as she advises aspiring writers, “just keep at it.”

With long, dark hair worn ‘60s style to her mid chest and with thick, heavy bangs, Rice has a gamine-like look that seems suited to the impish quality that often surfaces at her word processor. She has written several novels under a pseudonym, Anne Rampling. Using another nom de plume, A. N. Roquelaure (the French word for “cloak”), Rice wrote three books of erotica that she considered dedicating to Nancy Reagan.

“I don’t know,” she said, “can you sue for a dedication?”

Writing in a fashion she compares to “turning on a hose,” her books take root “like trees.” They sprout up along a path she likens to “The Wizard of Oz” and branch forth in directions that often surprise her. Always, she knows the name of a book before she embarks upon its contents. For example, “The Witching Hour,” a nonvampire book to be set here in the Garden District, will deal instead with witchcraft. Volume IV of “The Vampire Chronicles” has for its working title, “The Body Thief.”

Rambling On

Between the covers and the conclusions come dreams and fantasies and “God knows what,” Rice said. “For me there has to be a narrative and a reality,” she explained. The stories “ramble on,” much like the travels Rice’s own brain makes by night. She calls the technique her “essential dream.”

To Rice’s devoted readers, her vampires are, at their core, credible. Of course they have egos and hobbies and interesting taste in clothes. Naturally they quarrel, fall in love, debate the meaning of eternity.

Yet Rice would be the last to say she believes in the existence of vampires.

“I believe in everything else in the occult except vampires,” she said. “I think there is abundant evidence for astral projection, out-of-body experiences. I think the near-death experiences that you read about are fabulously well-documented. I believe there is abundant evidence to substantiate that there are apparitions and ghosts. But the one thing I find no evidence for are vampires. That is pure mythology, pure dream.”

She writes about them, Rice said, “because they offer the perfect image of the outsider.”

A Nasty Habit

Maybe she knows they don’t exist, but still, Rice’s vampires have a naughty habit of crowding her cranium.

“Like this morning, I was lying in bed and I was thinking about Santino,” Rice said of her Roman-born vampire. “I was thinking, now Santino needs his own story.”

Then she began worrying about the blood drought that may affect her characters as they invade “Chronicles.”

“It just hit me, they’re going to be experiencing a severe thirst,” Rice said.

Her voice made it clear that this could be a major catastrophe with potentially cosmic consequences that should be obvious to any vampire fan.

Rice’s pixie side crept in.

“This is a big responsibility, carrying around the history of the universe,” she said. In the next book, “I was hoping not to take on all of Western civilization.”

New Age Stores

The books in “The Vampire Chronicles” are sometimes sold in New Age bookstores, a fact of marketing life that sometimes perplexes the author.

“If you read the new book,” she said, “it presents a skeptical view, a very nihilistic view of the spirit world. There was something there, a spirit, but what it was saying was largely nonsense.”

This should surprise no one, Rice said, since spirits “are mainly idiots.”

Grateful for the generosity and success of a husband who “allowed me to be the mad one in the family,” Rice found fame, fans and financial remuneration when “Interview With the Vampire” was swallowed up by a public that had apparently been thirsting for vampire blood.

“I have to answer yes,” Rice said when asked if she thought she might ever grow up to be the proverbial rich and famous author. “But let me qualify. I dreamed it. And my dreams came true.”

A Crucial Lesson

Rice admonished, “You have to realize, I am not in the category of Stephen King.” But the success of the series has taught her one crucial lesson: “to continue.”

She has a problem, after all, that many writers would envy, in that “I don’t have the time for all the ideas I get. So I write every chance I get.”