The Anne Rice Library

The Wolf Chronicles #1

(from Amazon.com): When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it's at the behest of the home's enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably attacked--bitten--by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions. Why has he been given the wolf gift? What is its true nature--good or evil? And are there others out there like him?

Now in her new novel, as lush and romantic in detail and atmosphere as it is sleek and steely in storytelling, Anne Rice brings us once again to the rugged coastline of Northern California, to the grand mansion at Nideck Point--to further explore the unearthly education of her transformed Man Wolf.

The novel opens on a cold, gray landscape. It is the beginning of December. Oak fires are burning in the stately flickering hearths of Nideck Point. It is Yuletide. For Reuben Golding, now infused with the wolf gift and under the loving tutelage of the Morphenkinder, this Christmas promises to be like no other...as he soon becomes aware that the Morphenkinder, steeped in their own rituals, are also celebrating the Midwinter Yuletide festival deep within Nideck forest.

From out of the shadows of the exquisite mansion comes a ghosttormented, imploring, unable to speak yet able to embrace and desire with desperate affection... As Reuben finds himself caught up with the passions and yearnings of this spectral presence and the preparations for the Nideck town Christmas reach a fever pitch, astonishing secrets are revealed, secrets that tell of a strange netherworld, of spirits--centuries old--who possess their own fantastical ancient histories and taunt with their dark, magical powers...

From the Hardcover edition.

Ramses the Damned #1

(Ballantine Books First Mass Market Edition, October 1991): Ramses the Great Lives...but having drunk the elixir of life, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied. Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes the close companion of a voluptuous heiress, Julie Stratford, who is the center of a group of jaded aristocrats with appetites of their own to appease.

But the pleasures Ramses enjoys with Julie cannot soothe him. Searing memories of his last reawakening, at the behest of Cleopatra, his beloved Queen of Egypt, burn in his immortal soul. And his intense longing for her, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger...

Ramses the Damned #2

(from Amazon.com): From the iconic, bestselling author of The Vampire Chronicles, Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra.

In this mesmerizing, glamorous tale of ancient feuds and modern passions, Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old. This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life.

She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality, and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.

Ramses the Damned #3

(from Amazon.com): The gilded adventures of Ramses the Damned, iconic creation of the legendary bestselling author, continue in this breathtakingly suspenseful tale of a titanic supernatural power unleashed on the eve of war.

A pharaoh made immortal by a mysterious and powerful elixir, Ramses the Great became counselor and lover to some of Egypt's greatest and most powerful rulers before he was awakened from centuries of slumber to the mystifying and dazzling world of Edwardian England. Having vanquished foes both human and supernatural, he's found love with the beautiful heiress Julie Stratford, daughter of Lawrence Stratford, the slain archeologist who discovered his tomb. Now, with the outbreak of a world war looming, Ramses and those immortals brought forth from the mists of history by his resurrection will face their greatest test yet.

Russian assassins bearing weapons of immense power have assembled under one command: all those who loved Lawrence Stratford must die. From the glowing jewels at their necks comes an incredible supernatural force: the power to bring statues to life. As Ramses and his allies, including the immortal queens Cleopatra and Bektaten, gather together to battle these threats, Ramses reveals that the great weapon may have roots in an ancient Egyptian ritual designed to render pharaohs humble before Osiris, the god of the underworld. The resulting journey will take them across storm-tossed seas and into the forests of northern Russia, where they will confront a terrifying collision of tortured political ambitions and religious fervor held in thrall to a Godlike power. But the true answers they seek will lie beyond the border between life and death, within realms that defy the imagination of even an immortal such as Ramses the Great.

Lestat, as he moves us through his existence, is increasingly tormented by the question of salvation and even sainthood. He takes us through his first sexual experience in 200 years with Gretchen in The Tale of the Body Thief, then anguishes over his love for Rowan Mayfair (but cannot actually have sex with her) in Blood Canticle.

Rowan Mayfair, though she never puts her questions in the context of God, explores the same questions more philosophically. Like Lestat, she is concerned with morals - right and wrong, natural versus unnatural. Even Mona, the "wanderslut," acts upon her moral conviction when she first learns of her pregnancy by announcing the baby will be delivered and raised by Mona ("this is a Catholic family...we don't do away with babies" ~Taltos). Later, she carries her grudge against Rowan for the reason that she feels Rowan is directly responsible for taking a newborn - Mona's newborn - away from its mother.

Then there was Louis, who searched from the very beginning. In life, he had no answer for the loss of someone he loved (in the book, his brother; in the movie, his wife and child) so he wanted to end his life. When his life became a sort of living death, "undead," he had no choice but to search for meaning to his existence. Again, same questions, different framework.

Michael Curry, though he had separated from the Church (as had Rice at the time she wrote the Mayfair trilogy), still exhibited a desire to see, if not necessarily worship, at the altar of his childhood. Though his tour through St. Mary's is nostalgic more than anything else, he is still thrilled at the prospect of a traditional, beautiful white-dress wedding.

Can we say Azriel was not searching for some kind of meaning, or the man who talked with him, hearing the story of how Azriel became the Servant of the Bones? Was not Triana Becker in a similar torment (the most autobiographical fiction character Rice ever wrote about; I thought Violin was one of her best and most underrated novels)? Though her torment, on the surface, seemed to be about her compromised talent for playing the violin and her own confidence, what we see under the surface is extreme guilt and pain for the people she has lost.

Authors write about what they know, what interests them and what concerns them. When I sit down to write (not on this site), I write from those three elements. You could also say that writers also pursue what obsesses them. In that way, writing can be cathartic, but also can give us greater understanding as we see the things our minds have created spelled out before us. Getting it down on paper (or word processor) allows us breathing room; it allows us to explore different aspects of the story and it grows from there, becomes richer and the things we weren't aware of about ourselves and the world we live in become apparent.

It was apparent to me that Rice's most enduring characters endured because she put more into them than others. The specific "thing" she put into them was an ongoing spiritual torment that could not be resolved; there was no neat beginning, middle and happy ending. Indeed, characters struggled to establish a beginning in order to find a path through the middle they were muddling through to get to that elusive happy ending.

I don't think it was Rice's intention to reshape anything from the past to make it fit into her current context. It just happens that this is the major theme behind her life's work, and her life itself. This is what is the most apparent in her work because this is one of the most critical things to her as a person. I think fans appreciate that more than they will admit. It's easy to be scared off by the label "religious fiction" but this is hardly the first time in history that religious fiction has been written or published in any guise.

Rice's earlier work is often referred to as "gothic fiction." I think it would be very interesting to look at what is "gothic" and what is "religious."

They could speak English, or Spanish, or French, or Africaans...or they could have a language all their own that no living person could ever learn. They could be black, brown, white, pink, blue, yellow...or they could be of indeterminate color. I'll bet they know a lot about Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wicca, Shinto, atheism...

Can they fly, or do they use teleporters? The angels in the picture seem to all have wings but are those our own metaphor for how we perceive their ability to be mobile in the atmosphere? To us, the only things that fly in the air have wings. Naturally, we are going to assign these heavenly creatures an anatomy that requires wings for flight. Does that mean they could be part raptor without the talons?

There are so many questions and so many different answers that it's easy for it all to make your head dizzy.

It's okay to ask questions...that is why religious and gothic fiction both are so enduring.

The fans of Anne Rice's earlier work seem to be a mixed bag as to how they react to her religious fiction and her spiritual memoir, Called Out of Darkness. Anne Rice herself had to defend her work quite a bit but I think she expected it, if I understand the back notes to Out of Egypt correctly.

The Parlor welcomes all spiritual and religious beliefs. We don't all have to have the same ones, but we can still all get along...