‘Heart and soul’ still in New Orleans after Rice moved to California

The literary queen of New Orleans has abandoned the sleepy mysteries and quiet elegance of the Garden District for the sunny shores of Southern California – a plot twist right up there with Dickens killing off Little Nell in “The Old Curiosity Shop,” one of Anne Rice’s favorite novels.

“I reread ‘Great Expectations’ constantly and study it to see how Dickens handled the characters. Dickens is my greatest inspiration,” says Rice, sitting demurely on a chair in the spacious living room of her new home in La Jolla.

The author of the “Vampire Chronicles” series and the current best seller “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” also revisits Dickens’ “David Copperfield” and “The Old Curiosity Shop” regularly.

And the normally reserved Rice grows animated when discussing the emotional impact of the latter story, in which young heroine Nell must flee 19th-century London and endure a life of hardship.

“And then she dies!” says Rice, her voice rising and pausing for emphasis, her hands framing the moment as she leans forward in her chair.

“I mean who thought she was going to die?” she adds with a sad, still-disbelieving smile.

In her case, Rice says, she was fleeing nothing in particular when she left New Orleans in March; it was just time to move on. Her husband, Stan Rice, had died of a brain tumor two years before, and her son, novelist Christopher Rice, had grown up and moved to Los Angeles.

“It was a feeling of having completed something,” says Rice, who always believed she left New Orleans before her time when her father took a job in Texas when she was 15. She moved back in 1988 and quickly became the city’s literary hero.

“We did everything there,” she recalls fondly. “We’d have big parties at Christmas and Mardi Gras and we’d have a float in the parade every year.”

At public events, Rice would even show up in a coffin, lampooning her vampire image.

But during the past year, she says, she came to realize, “I had done everything there that I had needed to do. I realized I could leave now.”

Her new home, an earth-toned, California-style mansion, clings to a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean in this tony San Diego suburb that some have whimsically dubbed “Beverly Hills by the Sea.”

Rice arrived here just months before Hurricane Katrina devastated her beloved New Orleans, although her mansion in the famed Garden District and other properties survived.

She has posted numerous emotional appeals for help on her Web site but so far has refused to return, saying she can’t bear to see the devastation of a city in which her “heart and soul” still reside.

Dubbing her California home “Paradise West,” Rice has filled it with thousands of her favorite books and movies, as well as scores of religious icons that reflect her 1998 reconciliation with the Catholic church.

“I got kind of tired of being an atheist,” she says of her return to the church she left at age 18. “It began not to make sense to me, and I got tired of our cocky attitude.”

Indeed, one of the first things a visitor notices upon entering the elegantly furnished home is a decided lack of vampires or gothic memorabilia commemorating such famous Rice works as “Interview With the Vampire,” “Menoch the Devil” and “Blood Canticle.”

Instead, the wall-to-wall picture window that frames her two-story living room looks out on the ocean and – to the initial surprise of the owner – lets in an enormous amount of sunlight.

“But light is a good thing,” Rice says.

A wall behind her is filled with her husband’s paintings, including a stunning pair of colorful portraits he did of himself and his wife and which hang side by side. An open book of his poetry rests on a table nearby.

Rice, who looks younger than her 64 years, has suffered some health problems of her own in recent years, including a life-threatening intestinal blockage in 2002 and a near-fatal diabetic coma in 1998.

But she brushes aside questions about her health with a wave of her hand and the words, “I’m fine now.” She has also noticeably lost weight in recent years, giving her a trim, fit appearance.

Her diabetes requires she must “eat constantly,” Rice complains, and an assistant has laid out a snack of sliced banana and cookies for her. They remain untouched, as she finds herself too polite to nibble in front of guests.

Rice presides over a substantial literary empire that includes more than two dozens books and employs several dozen people, from accountants to assistants to agents.

The most well known of her books, “Interview With the Vampire,” not only became a hit film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt but is now the musical “Lestat” with songs by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. It’s scheduled to open on Broadway next year after a brief run in San Francisco, which began Dec. 17.

Although she is looking forward to seeing it, Rice believes she is done with writing about vampires.

“The vampire was sort of a metaphor for being beyond the reach of God,” she says. “Well, not beyond the reach, because I don’t believe anybody is really beyond the reach of God. But being an outsider.”

The author, who once wrote a series of books about New Orleans witches, now expects to spend the rest of her literary life writing a series of historical novels about Jesus Christ.

“People say she’s writing about religion now but, well, the books have always been about religion in some way or another,” says her longtime editor, Victoria Wilson, who discovered Rice 30 years ago when an agent showed her an “Interview With the Vampire” manuscript.

“They always ask large questions, whether it’s the question of good and evil or others.”

That vision, coupled with Rice’s talent as a storyteller – a talent that includes an incredible eye for description – is what Wilson believes has forged an almost unbreakable emotional connection between the author and her readers.

According to Rice, those readers can look forward to three or four more Christ books.

“I have scenes written all the way through Jesus’ life, up to the ascension into heaven,” she says.

Asked if she believes there will someday be a second coming to write about, the normally self-assured writer pauses for just a moment, seemingly caught off-guard.

Then she replies, with a shy smile, “Of course – I’m a Catholic.”