Vampire novelist “haunted” by Christ

By Karin Armstrong and ChristianWeek | January 29, 2010

"Up until the age of fourteen I was a seriously religious child." This is how Anne Rice, the author of a long list of vampire novels describes her childhood. A consistently poor reader until well into college, Rice credits her mother and her experience of church with teaching her about God. "I vividly remember knowing about God, that He loved us, made us, took care of us," she writes. This education took place in the heart of Roman Catholic New Orleans during the 1940's. Her family's world was filled with the Catholic Church: mass, incense, icons, statues and pictures on the church walls. To her these were all symbols of the God she talked to intimately and loved dearly.

The arts were also part of her family life. Rice's mother believed in complete creativity, allowing her children to colour and paste paper dolls on the walls. Reading poetry, trips to the museum and going to the opera and to movies were part of regular life. Television was regarded with suspicion, but radio, with its music and drama, was important.

When Rice was 13 her mother died of alcoholism. Shortly thereafter her family moved to Dallas, Texas. Rice writes that her early Catholic life had been so protected and structured that the family "might as well have been entering America for the first time." She quit talking to God and her hunger for knowledge and information led her into the forbidden world of books and foreign film. Her faith began to crack. During her early college years an off-handed remark by a young priest about there being "no life for her outside the Catholic church" finalized her decision to leave the Church. For 38 years she abandoned the Catholic faith and quit believing in God. "I could not separate my personal relationship with God and with Jesus Christ, from my relationship with the church."

Rice married Stan Rice, a writer and poet. Together they lived and studied in San Francisco. It was after their young daughter's death that Rice became a writer—a writer who wrote by instinct, pouring out darkness and despair, writing about outcasts, vampires and witches. Looking back now, she realizes that she was lamenting her lost faith.

Rice describes herself as being "Christ haunted" as she traveled and researched for her stories. It was on a trip to Italy in St. Peter's Basilica that she experienced an incredible pain over not acknowledging what she knew to be true: that God was God. In 1998 Rice was reconciled to the Church and writes that she surrendered to God.

"There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything, I did not have to know anything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point." A few years later she made the choice to write for God and only for Him. In that choice she has become a student of Scripture and of religion in America. This has led to her understanding of Christ's message to her, to love both friend and enemy.

For readers of Rice's vampire novels, this "spiritual confession" as she describes it, will likely come as a paradox: she was truly "called out of darkness" into the light of God's love. For those, like me, who have never read those stories, this book is an experience of the Roman Catholic faith and an experience of God's redemptive love.

Rice's roaming narrative is unique and guarded in places but is also gripping as she unfolds a haunting journey. I look forward to reading her more recent writings, stories of the life of Jesus whom she obviously loves deeply.