Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice

Recounts the life of a writer best known for vampire novels but also the author of erotica under pseudonyms, and discusses her work

The life of novelist Anne Rice ( Interview with the Vampire , etc.) is almost as unusual as her fiction. Her birthname was Howard Allen O'Brien, and she changed her first name to Anne before marrying Stan Rice. Born in 1941, she grew up in a New Orleans full of Southern gothic ambience; her father enjoyed taking her through cemeteries. The death of her alcoholic, highly religious mother, and the later loss of her own daughter to leukemia, plunged her into grief, obsessive-compulsive behavior and nearly fragmented her. Through her supernatural tales and erotica written under a number of pseudonyms, she explored her own masochistic impulses, "sought to unite the male and female within herself" and expressed her desire for humanity's "enlightenment free of religious tyranny," according to Ramsland, who teaches philosophy at Rutgers. In a revelatory, intimate biography that fans will relish, Ramsland interprets Rice's vampires as metaphors of seduction and submission to a higher mystery and power. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Exciting life of bestselling gothicist Anne Rice, by psychologist/philosopher Ramsland (Philosophy/Rutgers). Benefiting from Rice's input, this will have to be thought of as an ``authorized'' biography, although Ramsland is her own writer--and at times a heavy-going writer, bearing what might be called the Curse of the Jungians, an overdense working out of Rice's sea-changes and gender shiftings. Born in New Orleans and named Howard Allen, Rice has always been an outsider with strong male traits and since childhood has refused to accept victimization by dress and gender codes. Like Orson Welles, she and her three sisters were raised from infancy to be geniuses, allowed to stay up late, dabble at will and read what they wished, and skip school, all with the doting permission of their alcoholic mother, Katherine, and highly moral Catholic father, Howard. Katherine's death at 48 was the deepest blow Rice had ever experienced (alcoholism claimed many family members at that very age and might have claimed Rice as well had she and her brilliant poet-husband Stan Rice not agreed in 1979 to total abstinence)--and was followed by her daughter Michele's death from leukemia at age five. These events fed in a disguised fashion into her first successful novel, Interview with the Vampire, and into her following vampire novels, which, Ramsland shows, granted immortality to her dead mother and daughter--until Rice killed them off and arose psychically refreshed. Despite success, she writes as she wishes: Later novels were audience-losers, as were pseudonymous porno novels, until she returned to her vampire chronicles. Ramsland's study climaxes in the middle--with the deeply moving death of Michele as recaptured by Stan's electric elegy--and her later knifework on the Rice psyche and its fictions gets tiresome. Still, the book is mostly quite gripping, and deserves to hit big and probably will. (Sixteen pages of b&w photograph--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Rice is author of the successful "Vampire Chronicles" ( Interview with the Vampire , LJ 5/1/76; The Vampire Lestat , LJ 10/1/85; The Queen of the Damned , LJ 10/1/88). Born in 1941 in New Orleans, she grew up in an atmosphere of Irish Catholic and Southern Creole culture tinged by fantasy and supernaturalism and was influenced by feminism and the gay counterculture during the Sixties and Seventies. Identifying with those on the fringe of conventional society, she moved from vampires to mummies ( The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned , LJ 4/1/89), witches ( The Witching Hour , LJ 10/15/90), erotica, and even pornography. As Ramsland demonstrates, Rice's themes express duality and conflict: male/female, dominance/submission, hero/victim, freedom/suppression. Ramsland is thorough, but she spends more time recounting plot than showing how the themes she uncovers are carried out in Rice's work. Nevertheless, her painstaking biography will be useful for both lay and scholarly readers.
- Addie Lee Bracy, Beaver Coll. Lib., Glenside, Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.