RIP Anne Rice, whose 1976 Interview With the Vampire is “responsible for the image of vampires that dominates pop culture today”
Anne Rice, Author of Interview With The Vampire, Dead at 80
AMC is working on an “Anne Rice Universe of interconnected TV series adaptations.
From 2006: Anne Rice will make you believe
Anne Rice (1941-2021), who died December 11, 2021, was an American author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and religious literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. Two books from The Vampire Chronicles were adapted to film—Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Queen of the Damned (2002).
Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976 and went on to become a best-seller, leading to The Vampire Chronicles and a film adaptation starring Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst. Mental Floss lauded the novel as “almost single-handedly responsible for the image of vampires that dominates pop culture today.”
Rice published more than 30 novels, which together have sold over 150 million copies worldwide.
Christopher Rice, her son, announced her death on social media, explaining the cause as complications following a stroke.
"In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage," he wrote. "The immensity of our family's grief cannot be overstated. As my mother, her support for me was unconditional—she taught me to embrace my dreams, reject conformity and challenge the dark voices of fear and self-doubt. As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions."
Rice stated to Time in 2008 that the vampires she wrote about were a metaphor for lost souls and viewed The Vampire Chronicles as "a sort of search for God and a kind of grief for a lost faith," which led her to write Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and its sequel Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.
In 2003, the Horror Writers Association honored Anne Rice with the Lifetime Achievement award.
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