Godspeed Anne Rice

Anne Rice, who revolutionized horror fiction with such books as The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned, died on December 11 2021 at the age of 80. The cause was complications from a stroke.

Anne Rice was born  Howard Allen Frances O'Brien on October 4 1941 in New Orleans. Explanations for her male birth name have varied, but all agree that she was named for her father. She adopted the name"Anne" on her first day of school. A nun asked her what her name was, ad she said "Anne," because she thought it was a pretty name. Her name was legally changed to "Anne" in 1947. Her mother died when she was 15, and her father later remarried. Her father moved the family to north Texas when she was 16. It was at Richardson High School in north Texas that she met her future husband Stan Rice. After graduating from Richardson High School she attended for her freshman year and North Texas State College also in Denton for her sophomore year. She dropped out of college because she ran out of money. After moving to California she completed her education at the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State University.

It was in 1976 that Anne Rice's first book, Interview with The Vampire was published. It was the first book in the The Vampire Chronicles series and introduced her most famous character, Lestat. It would be followed by the much more successful The Vampire Lestat in 1985. It would be followed by twelve more novels in The Vampire Chronicles. Her second book was the historical novel The Feast of All Saints in 1979. In 1983 the novel The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, which she wrote under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, was published. It was the first in her series of erotic novels based on the "Sleeping Beauty" fairy tale. In 1965 Exit to Eden and in 1986 Belinda were published. Both were under the pseudonym Anne Rampling and both were erotic fiction.

In 1989 Ramses the Damned was published. It dealt with the resurrected mummy trope. It was followed by two more Ramses novels. The following year The Witching Hour, the first in the trilogy Lives of the Mayfair Witches, was published. In the Naughts  she wrote two religious novels, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ  the Lord: The Road to Cana. In 2012 The Wolf Gift was published, the first of two books dealing with lycanthropy.

Anne Rice revolutionized vampire fiction. She was among the first authors to humanize vampires, starting with Interview with The Vampire. In humanizing vampires, Anne Riche also altered the mythos surrounding them. Not to content to use the myths established by Bram Stoker and countless vampire movies, Mrs. Rice created her own myths. She also infused her novels with an eroticism that was not yet commonplace in works on vampires. Anne Rice would bring her own take to other classic figures of horror as well, from resurrected mummies to witches to werewolves. Anne Rice changed the horror genre forever.