Gothic novelist dies at 80
Anne Rice, the gothic novelist best known for “Interview With the Vampire,” the 1976 book that in 1994 became a popular film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, died Saturday. She was 80.
Her son, Christopher Rice, wrote on social media that the cause was complications from a stroke.
His post did not say where she died.
Anne Rice was a largely unknown writer when she turned a short story she had written in the late 1960s into “Interview With the Vampire,” her first published novel. It features a solitary vampire named Louis who is telling his life story to a reporter, but Rice said the tale was her story as well.
“I really got into the character,’’ she told The New York Times in 1988. “For the first time, I was able to describe my reality, the dark, gothic influence on my childhood. It’s not fantasy for me. My childhood came to life for me.”
Many critics gave the book short shrift, seeming not to grasp either its tone or its appeal.
“The publicity tells us Rice is ‘a dazzling storyteller,’ “Leo Braudy wrote in the Times.
“But there is no story here, only a series of sometimes effective but always essentially static tableaus out of Roger Corman films, and some self - - - conscious soliloquizing out of Spiderman comics, all wrapped in a ballooning, pompous language.”
The reading public, though, latched on; “Interview With the Vampire” became a bestseller, and Rice found herself with a considerable fan base, which she proceeded to entertain with a series of follow-up novels that became known collectively as the Vampire Chronicles. The books, more than a dozen in all, are widely credited with fueling a revival of interest in all things vampiric, which has been reflected on the big and small screens as well as onstage ever since.