What I Owe Anne Rice
“What a wonderful thing to have lived long enough to see the power of labels broken, the ‘rules’ of genre thrown to the winds, the bias of high culture ignored or stood on its head.”
This quote sounds like it could be in reference to Game of Thrones, with its reputation for getting people to take fantasy seriously before its downfall. But, as made obvious by the title of this piece, it was actually said by Anne Rice, the Queen of literary monsters, as coronated by PBS’s video on her via their Storied channel.
And, as noted by the video, Anne Rice didn’t just live to see this shift in attitude towards fantasy, she played a key in role making it happen. Like just about every writer ever, her struggle to get her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, published in 1976 was well, a struggle. Her prose was extremely purple, but it was done well, and it lent itself to the book reading like proper literary fiction. This made her work difficult to categorize because it featured elements that were hard to get taken seriously, like, you know, vampires.
She had tried to go the more “respectable” route of writing historical fiction with The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven. Turns out there was no winning with that genre either, so she apparently said fuck it, and wrote the thing she wanted to write rather than what would be respected.
And 100 million copies sold later, and Anne Rice was solidified as a major player in not just genre fiction, but literature as a whole.
Her work wasn’t just popular in numbers, it was what I think a lot of writers strive for: influential. She was essentially the trope maker for the morally ambiguous, brooding, sexy vampire that we see in works from authors like Charlaine Harris with Eric Northman and Bill Compton and Kim Harrison with Kisten Felps, as well teen dramas like The Vampire Diaries and yes, Twilight (though maybe not quite as intentional with the moral ambiguity). Hell, aspects of this character type can be seen in anime and manga like Vampire Knight with Kaname Kuran and Zero Kiryu. Even goddamn Hellsing, which is so celebrated for making vampires manly badasses again, couldn’t resist making its nineties antihero protagonist Alucard somewhat sympathetic and tragic and yes, I am crediting Anne Rice for making that possible.
The Vampire Chronicles codified our modern interpretation of vampires, who before were dominated by the likes of Dracula as played Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. Rice’s vampires were deliberately sexy in a context separate from the forbidden fruit appeal of the rape metaphor that Dracula represented. They weren’t necessarily heroic, but it was okay to like them as something besides villains.
And it was this vampire type was what got me to love reading. Lestat was my first vampire crush, yes, and I continued reading works in related genres, specifically on the lookout for such sexy vampires. I found them in the Sookie Stackhouse Series by Harris and the Cassandra Palmer series by Karen Chance. I wanted more of them, so I sought out more stories in the genre those were in, urban fantasy, and I found the Kitty Norville series by Carrie Vaughn, and the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs, and The Hollows series by Kim Harrison. These featured not just the hot, romantic vampires I was looking for, they also included telepaths and fae and psychics and ghosts and gods and werewolves and shifters and witches and elves.
Then I wanted to read more about all these beings. So my horizons expanded to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, and Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher saga, which of course led to the Witcher games which led to Dragon Age, which led to Baldur’s Gate. And that’s not even getting into how the sexy Anne Rice vampire got me onto my obsession with Vampire the Masquerade.
And as I got more enamored with these stories, something else happened: I didn’t just want to read them, I wanted to write them. I wanted to create my own sexy vampires, and witches, and ghosts, and gods. I wanted to build worlds for them to live in and adventures to them to go on and romances to engage in. I wanted to write. I wanted to be a writer.
Everybody credits Tolkien with being influential to the fantasy genre, and fair enough, his works have shaped my worldbuilding. But it was the change that Anne Rice made to the fantasy landscape, the introduction of her Byronic vampire type that sparked my love for reading and my yearning to tell stories. So it is Anne Rice I will always owe my love of writing to.
