Image: Paul Hawthorne (Getty Images)
On late Saturday evening, it was announced that Anne Rice, the novelist of gothic horror books such as “Interview with a Vampire,” died at 80 years old. The news broke from her son Christopher, who revealed on social media that complications from a stroke led to her passing.
“She left us almost 19 years to the day my father, her husband Stan, died,” Christopher wrote. “In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage…Let us take comfort in the shared hope that Anne is now experiencing firsthand the glorious answers to many great spiritual and cosmic questions, the quest for which defined her life and career.”
Born in 1941 in New Orleans, where most of her books take place, Rice began her prolific writing career with the aforementioned “Interview with a Vampire” in 1976. From the 80s and onward, she would publish sequels in the series that would come to be known as “The Vampire Chronicles,” which still receives stories to this day. (The most recent book, “Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat,” was published in 2018.) She would branch out and write other books and franchises over the decades, and not all of them horror. In 1979 and 1982, she wrote the respective historical novels “The Feast of All Saints” and “Cry to Heaven.” Under the pseudonyms Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure, she would publish erotic fiction such as “Exit to Eden” and “The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty.” Her final work — “The Reign of Osiris,” the third installment in the historical horror “Ramses the Damned” series co-written with Christopher — is expected to release on February 1, 2022.
Some of Rice’s works would come to be adapted to film, with the most famous being 1994's Interview with a Vampire starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. The book is expected to be adapted to television for AMC next year, along with an adaptation of her gothic horror trilogy Mayfair Witches by the same network.
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Rice is expected to be interred at the Rice family’s New Orleans mausoleum in a private ceremony, with a public event next year intended to celebrate her life.
Our thoughts are with the Rice family at this time.
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