Anne Rice: From the Popular
Vampire to the Popular Christ
Proem
In the spring of 1976, Alfred A. Knopf published Interview with the
Vampire, the first novel by author Anne Rice. Though the book sold decently, if
not spectacularly, in hardcover, it did not become a bona fide bestseller until
Ballantine released the mass market paperback edition at roughly the same time
the following year. Nevertheless, Rice chose not to return to the erotic,
sensuous, and richly detailed vampiric world she had created in Interview with
the Vampire for nearly a decade after her original foray into its depths. When
The Vampire Lestat reached the nation’s bookstores in 1985, it proved more
successful in its first hardback trade edition than its predecessor, and spent
several weeks just below the mid-point on the New York Times's Bestseller List.
The year 1988 witnessed the appearance of yet another sequel to both Interview
with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, entitled The Queen o f the Damned
which, with nearly 400,000 copies sold in hardcover, not only attained the
coveted Number 1 spot on the Times's Bestseller List, but also outperformed its
predecessors in terms of sales by exceptionally wide respective margins. As
such, it can be remarked that The Vampire Chronicles, as the trio of books had
come to be known by this point, had succeeded in seducing the ever-fickle
American reading public.
Since 1988, The Vampire Chronicles has come to encompass seven
additional volumes beyond The Queen o f the Damned, including: The Tale o f
the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), The Vampire Armand (1998),
Merrick (2000), Blood and Gold (2001), Blackwood Farm (2002), and, finally,
Blood Canticle (2003). Arguably, the series’s, and Rice’s, popularity peaked
with the publication of Memnoch the Devil in July of 1995, a novel that sold
nearly one million copies in hardcover alone, each priced at a full $25.00 (15
years later, comparable pricing would be $25.95) before the usual mass-retailer
discounts. Yet, despite her success with matters secular, Rice boldly and
permanently altered both the shape and the purpose of her career as a popular
author with the publication, in the late fall of 2005, of the novel Christ the Lord:
Out o f Egypt, the initial book in a projected series devoted exclusively to the life
of Jesus Christ.
In “Anne’s Profession of Faith,” a brief article on her website, Rice tells us
that after losing her faith for a variety of reasons in the 1960s, it was not until
1998 that she returned to the Catholic Church as a wholehearted practicing
believer. Four years later, she experienced the following epiphany about Jesus
Christ: “I realized that the greatest thing I could do to show my complete love
for Him was to consecrate my work to Him—to use any talent I had acquired as
a writer, as a storyteller, as a novelist—for Him and for Him alone.” Rice