Anne Rice: she's baaaack...

...or so she tells Time magazine this week:

"One more book." Those are the words Anne Rice fans have been dying to hear about the Vampire Chronicles ever since her shocking — and dismaying to many of his followers — turn to religious writing. Long seen as a committed atheist, four years ago the best-selling author drove a stake through the hearts of her followers when she vowed to abandon her sinister stories and instead write only of the Lord.

Turns out, vampires aren't that easy to kill. In an interview with TIME, the best-selling author of Interview with the Vampire and The Queen of the Damned, has revealed that she plans to write one last book about Lestat, the feared, yet beloved, blood-sucking main character in her gothic novel series. "When I published my first book about the Lord I said I would never write about those characters again," Rice acknowledged. "But I have one more book that I would really like to write. It will be a story that I need to tell."

This must be great news to her legions of vampire fans, who I don't think have embraced her Christian novels with the same brio that they did the Lestat books. (Her latest, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, comes out next month, and I doubt that this announcement on the eve of its publication was a coincidence.)

I'm not a Rice fan, but I'm not a detractor, either. That said, I reviewed two of her last Vampire books, and they were just Too Much -- too much description, too much melodrama, too much everything. By page 500, I had verbal gout. This excerpt from my review of 1998's The Vampire Armand in The Washington Post holds up pretty well, and sums up her latter-day vampire career:

As usual, it’s not just the epic plot, but Rice’s voluptuary worldview that’s the main attraction. Not many writers can shift from ruminations on Christianity into casual homoeroticism without stripping their gears, but Rice does it with ease. Elegant narrative has always been her hallmark; she glops on juicy, rococo descriptions as if they were scoops of whipped cream. And her talent for describing Gothic interiors down to the last bibelot and objet d’art makes her the Martha Stewart of the Charles Addams set.

Not all of Armand works this well. At times, Rice’s loamy dialogue veers into Barbara Cartlandisms (“Your face is as a jewel given me, which I can never forget, though I may foolishly lose it. Its glister will torture me forever.”). And when Rice brings these florid folk to modern-day New Orleans, she dilutes both the power of their personae and the power of the narrative; these characters seem too overripe for even the most elegantly decadent of American cities.

That said: I really hope that the story she "has" to tell somehow involves her vampires during and after Hurricane Katrina, because if there was ever a backdrop for her brand of sorrow and excess, that's it. I was at a Borders on Saturday and came across a table groaning with newly published Katrina books; a few looked interesting, but not one of them compelled me to buy it. But the dead souls of the Rice cosmology mingling with the dead souls in Katrina's wake: there are a lot of possibilities there. It could be a late-career shot in the arm...or it could be a huge mess. But read it? You bet I would.

Just don't let Tom Cruise anywhere near the project.

Comments

[Samuel John Klein]

That's not the only author whose world we've experienced gets way too top heavy after the stories have been told too often and too long. On a slightly more pedestrian level (our opinion only, YMMV) Laurell Hamilton's "Anita Blake" series started out okay (according to my wife, who likes that sort of thing) but, after five or six iterations fell way too in love with itself.

So odd has the fan-crit debate over her work has become, indeed, Laurell calls the disillusioned fans who still critique her work "negative fans" – like a negative number, they contribute to the whole even though she doesn't feel they contribute to her in the way she'd like them to. Sort of like an "any publicity is good publicity" POV.

[Kevin]

Not familiar with Laurell Hamilton - is she a SF or fantasy writer?

I will never understand those authors who become successful and then refuse to accept any but the most cursory editing (or refuse an editor at all). Were I in that position, I'd friggin DEMAND the best editor at the house...and not someone who was spending all her/his time in marketing meetings, but someone who was charged with going through my ms with a blue pencil as her/his job. Yaknow?

[Jil]

I absolutely adored "Interview with the Vampire", was less impressed with the next couple I read, and a third of the way through "Cry to Heaven" gave up on her completely.

I'm in full agreement on the editing. Two who come to mind are Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. After a while you've gone well past telling the story and now you're just into wasting trees.

[Samuel John Klein]

Laurell Hamilton writes what I'd call supernatural/gothic/romance/suspense fiction. Her "Anita Blake-Vampire Hunter" series is set in an alternate present where vampires and werewolves and such are real and some of them need ... well, someone to hunt them sometimes. The title character is kind of a hot sexy gun-for-hire with a liberal slathering of Mike Hammer - but not so much that she quits being hot and sexy.

I'm not interested in such things myself except in a sort of detached technical way - I fancied myself a budding author once and find the way authors build and sustain the worlds and characters they construct dead fascinating, so I view it vicariously through my wife, who lurves them stories sometimes.

From her reviews, Anita Blake started out interesting and sexy, but Anita has really kind of evolved into a Mary Sue for the author whose primary goal seems to be having as much sex as possible with various hot undead characters. The series is really in love with itself and has largely lost its point.

[Kate]

I've not read any Laurell Hamilton, but damn her books still seem to sell.

And Kevin, I absolutely agree - give me the editor hooked up to coffee via IV and a well-inked blue pen. I can't fathom doing without, and anyone who thinks they don't need them must be mad. Elizabeth Kostova comes to mind, Jil, when you mention wasting trees.

Reading the link, it sounds like Lestat struggles with spiritualism, and I'd bet gets converted (yawn). I particularly love how she justifies dusting off her vampires after finding God and swearing off them. Money talks.