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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Rice turns her literary chic

Anne Rice (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
By Cain Burdeau Associated Press

It’s Halloween, and Anne Rice has a new book – a memoir in fact – that’s climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then.

Normal if it were 1994.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, America’s most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn’t live in New Orleans anymore, and she’s riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit.

Her memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,” is evidence that Rice is reinventing herself.

In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn’t disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches following the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, “Interview With the Vampire.”

But she’s clearly moved on.

In a telephone interview from her mountain home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., Rice laid out her goal:

“To be able to take the tools, the apprenticeship, whatever I learned from being a vampire writer, or whatever I was – to be able to take those tools now and put them in the service of God is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful opportunity,” she said. “And I hope I can redeem myself in that way. I hope that the Lord will accept the books I am writing now.”

The memoir follows the release of two books in a planned four-part, first-person chronicle of the life of Jesus.

And in this new memoir, Rice presents her former life as that of a soul-searching wanderer in the deserts of atheism.

“I do think that those dark books were always talking about religion in their own way. They were talking about the grief for a lost faith,” she said.

In 2002, Rice broke away completely from atheism – nearly four decades after she gave up her Roman Catholic faith.

Yet, religion had to come back into her life, she writes. For her, it was something she’d have to face up to again like an absent parent or a long-lost love child.

By the late 1990s, when she went back to Mass, Rice – the author whose books sold in the tens of millions and who had recharged Hollywood’s appetite for vampire-inspired horror – had fallen on hard times.

Her husband, poet/artist Stan Rice, died in 2002. And she had developed diabetes.

She writes that her return of faith was preceded by a series of epiphanies – many while on travels to Europe’s cathedrals, Israel and Brazil. In one episode, when she visited the giant Jesus statue above Rio de Janeiro, she writes that she felt “delirium” as the clouds broke and revealed the statue.

Her turn from vampire fiction to Christian musings hasn’t impressed her critics.

In The New York Times, Christopher Buckley slammed Rice’s memoir as “a crashing, mind-numbing bore. This is the literary equivalent of waterboarding.”

But Rice doesn’t care about critics. “My objective is simple: It’s to write books about our Lord living on Earth that make him real to people who don’t believe in him,” she said.

The birthday bunch

Composer John Barry is 75. Actor Ken Berry is 75. Actor-radio personality Shadoe Stevens is 62. Singer Lulu is 60. Actress-comedian Roseanne Barr is 56. Actress Kate Capshaw is 55. Comedian Dennis Miller is 55. Singer Adam Ant is 54. Actor Dolph Lundgren is 51.