The Gospel According to Anne
The queen of the occult has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God—and writing her most daring book yet.

By David Gates
Newsweek
Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Sometimes Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end—and neither would you. Glass doors open onto a terrace that looks over the red-tiled roofs of La Jolla, Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in staffer brings meals to the table at the foot of her ornately carved wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone fireplace. She exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and enough books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The New York Times every morning—"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me"—watches news "till I can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a half a day e-mailing with her extraordinarily faithful readers.

They've been worried about her. After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there—and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.

Meeting the still youthful-looking Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill—except that on a warm October afternoon she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing. And if you were expecting Morticia Addams with a strange new light in her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee," she says, beckoning you to where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth. "We're from New Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."

To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship—some of which she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it—or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.

Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan—smiling, then weeping, then raging—Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.

Rice already has much of the next volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk about it.") But what's she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the best lines.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9785289/site/newsweek/

So she goes from writting shitty gay vampire books to writing shitty Jesus books. I wonder if she'll try to turn Jesus gay like she did the vampires?

Seriously... I liked the first couple of novels, but after that it went from gothic horror to gay vampire luv. It got even worse when she decided that her work was perfect and no editor should ever touch it. Anyone else remember her meltdown commentary review over on Amazon.com?

Paste magazine gave it a two out of four. Basically, the review said it was a less than thrilling fictionalization of Jesus as a 7 year old boy, and

Nice fact checking in that article. Her last book was Blood Canticle, NOT Blood Chronicle.

Anne Rice lost me YEARS ago . . . While I truly enjoyed the earlier (first four?) Vampire Chronicles, I soon found her writing style to be a laborious challenge for me to read. Something to be endured, rather than enjoyed.

The Amazon.com profile actually gives two positive reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly. I will admit that I shuddered when I heard that Rice was covering this subject, but it doesn't look that bad.

Rice is definitely an eccentric lady, but if she's found spiritual peace, then good for her. By the way, can a Catholic be a born again Christian or is that just a Protestant term?

She's not a "Born-Again Christian" she's a "Lapsed Lapsed Catholic."

Huh. Wow. Interesting. I've read the first 5 vamp novels and really liked them. Haven't read past that. Think she might decide they're "evil" and try to get them pulled out of circulation? Maybe I should pick up the rest of them before they're gone.

I'm waiting for Jesus vs Lestat personally.

I also enjoyed the vampire series until it turned gay. I'm done with Rice altogether.

In popular culture, I'd guess you could say that "born again Christian" is a term coined by the media to mean, "Christian who takes their faith seriously." Or "Religious Christian."

In reality though, "born again" is a Biblical term used by Jesus. In that way, all Christians (no matter denomination) are born again -- because in the context Jesus uses it, you have to be born again to be saved.

(born again just means born of the flesh and of the spirit.)

That sound you hear is 100,000 goths weeping.

I've always been confused by the born again thing. I've assumed it was very hardcore religious people. Many times people that had led sinful lives and were trying to turn them around through Christ. My aunt is one and she takes the bible way too literaly and actually believes Dinosaurs and humans lived on the Earth at the same time.

I certainly won't say there is proof everything in the bible is false, but the 6 day thing should not be taken that literal. I doubt God was working on the 24 hour work day back then.

I wouldn't even say that's a literal intepretation. Dinosaurs are never mentioned in the Bible. And the days in Genesis, when read in Hebrew, can mean a 12-hour day, a 24 hour day, or an indefinate amount of time.

But anyway... about "born again." I think you're correct. Common usage in popular culture, suggests that "born again Christian" is a hardcore religious person.

However, the term actually comes from the Bible -- and I think a bunch of hardcore religious people started referring to themselves as such -- and then the media and popular culture began associating the term with only them -- but in actuality all Christians would be born again.

Here's the passage from the Bible:
John 3:
3 In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

4 "How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"

5 Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

Christopher Moore already wrote the book about Jesus's childhood and coming to grips with his powers and destiny. It's called Lamb, the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.

I always thought born again meant being born into spiritual life from a spiritual death (i.e. baptism). I also didn't think Catholics used the term born-again. I guess all denominations have different interpretations.

I think born again means when you die and then live again as a undead being like a vampire or zombie.

I could be wrong, but I don't see how it could be about baptism. He doesn't mention baptism at all. I always took it to mean, having a spiritual mind / seeking spiritual things / having a relationship with God (i.e. a spiritual rebirth).

I don't really rely on denominational interpretations though.

I would say the 'popular/mass' definition of 'born again' is simply someone who lapsed in their original faith and then returned to it with fervous devotion.

anyway, only ever read one Anne Rice novel and that was 'Memnoch the Devil' which I thought was a great book on a stylistic level---story wise, I was pretty damn lost, but still enjoyed it.

Cool.

She used to show up at book signings lying in a coffin, right?

Maybe now she’ll show up… nailed to a cross.



If you need me, I’ll be waiting in front of Border’s.

And it was great! Very well done.

Ewwwww you want to nail her?

Did her house get fucked up during Katrina? I always wondered about this.