One of my favorite Anne Rice quotes.

Saturday, December 11, 2021, was a sad day for many including myself.  The novelist, Anne Rice, passed away at the age of 80.  Her son Christopher posted on her Facebook fan page that she passed due to complications from a stroke.  She was most well-known for her Vampire Chronicles series of books which started with “Interview with the Vampire” in 1976 and ended with “Blood Communion” in 2018.  You can read an obituary with interesting excerpts from past interviews here.

I didn’t necessarily want to write an obituary but rather a thank you letter to someone whom I have never met but who influenced my life and the lives of many others.

Since I was a child, I have always been drawn to the darker sides of history and stories.  I am not sure why.  I am not a dark or depressed person although I have been told I have a darker sense of humor.

Early on I had somewhat of an obsession concerning vampire stories.  My mom wasn’t always thrilled with that fact, but I didn’t like them because I was evil or because I liked the thought of drinking blood or sleeping in a coffin.  I liked them because most vampire stories aren’t really about vampires but rather human nature. 

One of my prized collections, A 25th Anniversary signed edition

Vampires are outcasts and who growing up as a kid never felt like an outcast.  They also all tend to have some sort of back story like a lost love or something traumatic that happened to them before they were vampires that caused them to want to pull away from life in the sunlight and disappear into the darkness forever.  However, because they are immortal there is always hope that they may someday find what they are missing or what they are truly looking for.  More of an eternal hope rather than an eternal death. 

I remember when I first picked up a paperback copy of Anne’s “Interview with The Vampire” and was reading it on the bus on the way to work.  This was in the early 1990s and I had just started working full time after graduating from the University of Illinois at Chicago.   I would take the bus from our home in Berwyn to the North Riverside Mall and then transfer to a bus going to my job in Westchester.  

I fell in love with Anne’s writing, and she quickly became my favorite author because there is just so much descriptive detail in her stories.  It makes you feel like you are in the story.  I know many of my friends didn’t like to read her books because they felt like a few pages of scene setup was just too hard to get through.  I on the contrary felt like I was seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting everything that Louis, the brand new, all too human vampire was.  I felt like I was there in New Orleans even though I had never been there.  Years later when I finally got a chance to visit New Orleans, the city felt and sounded familiar as if I had been there and I owe that to her beautiful writing.

Not only did Anne write as an artist painting on canvas, but she also brought life and a human nature to her undead characters.  You could feel the loneliness of the vampires who were going to go through their existence and lose their mortal friends and relatives and yearn for companionship even if that meant having to curse another to walk in eternal darkness.

My wife had gotten me these autographed Anne Rice book plates for my birthday.

You can also see some of the same struggles that Anne had regarding spirituality in her life.   Vampires struggling with the concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, morality and immorality, love and hate, loneliness and friendship, God and The Devil.   

While I had always wanted to get a chance to meet Anne in person, I feel like I had gotten to know her at a more intimate level by reading her books than any simple hello and handshake could have achieved.   

Reading her stories has influenced my own writing and while most of my writing has been historical non-fiction, I am trying my hand at a historically based novel.  I love setting the mood and scenes and am hoping to bring readers into the stories as much as Anne brought me into hers. 

In the end, she has achieved a bit of the same immortality as her characters.  Every time a new reader picks up one of her books her stories come alive again and another outcast finds solace in this sometimes cruel and cold world.

God’s speed Anne Rice and thank you.

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