Anne Rice

I took this blurry photo of Anne Rice, who passed away yesterday, in 2011, ten years ago at Comic Con. Thank goodness for my blog which preserves my memories better than my brain does.

I stood there a moment and watched her autograph a small stack of comics with a silver pen and thought about what to say, having the distinct feeling that she's someone it's probably very easy to accidentally say the wrong thing to. When she handed the stack to the vendor, I finally said something like, "Hi. I just wanted to tell you your books meant a lot to me--I used to read the vampire novels over and over."

"Thank you," she said, but I could see her eyes glaze over as she mentally tried to check out of the whole convention.

My tone in the blog entry sounds slightly like my feelings were hurt because she didn't acknowledge my presence more but they weren't, really. I can't imagine how long she'd spent in that booth signing things but having waves of people tell you they love your work must numb you to it after a while.

A lot of people, for as long as I can remember, and even to-day, talking about her sudden death, seem only able to pay her back-handed compliments, to grudgingly acknowledge what she accomplished. Maybe she did seem a little arrogant--her books are filled with the implicit philosophy that some people are meant to live in wealth and luxury, and obviously she considered herself one of those people. She died in Rancho Mirage, California, in Riverside, not far from my hometown of San Diego, where she also lived for a time, in La Jolla, the most expensive part of town. For someone whose association with New Orleans was so famous it's somewhat surprising that she spent her last years in southern California. Except, of course, that's where the luxury is.

You see, even I'm being backhanded. But let's be honest for a moment about what she accomplished. When I saw her at Comic Con, I noted the irony that massive crowds were gathered there for Twilight and True Blood, two franchises that arguably wouldn't exist if not for her. What else owes her a debt of gratitude? Virtually any and all vampire fiction published after Interview with the Vampire. But more than just that. For many years, even people who wouldn't now rank Interview with the Vampire as their favourite work of gothic fiction would still have to admit it was their gateway, back when they were first discovering this stuff, to other things in the genre.

Interview with the Vampire was also part of a wave of postmodernist fiction in the late '60s and early '70s that reexamined famous works of fiction by writing new works from the point of view of the villain. Books such as Grendel and Wide Sargasso Sea, which recontextualised Beowulf and Jane Eyre, respectively. The success of Interview with the Vampire eclipsed all other works of the genre, perhaps because, of all of them, it most has its own identity, its own thematic drive outside the context of the original fiction it's riffing off of.

It so happens I'm in the middle of reading Interview with the Vampire again. I'm about halfway through the book and last week I reached the part where the interviewee, the titular vampire, Louis, recounts his first trip to Europe, along with the eternal vampire child, Claudia. Searching for answers to their own origins, they travel through eastern Europe, only to encounter zombie-like, mindless specimens of the undead, terrorising villagers. This section wasn't included in the famous film adaptation by Neil Jordan, possibly because it's the part of the novel that feels the most conventional. It very much has the tone of a Hammer horror film and I'm reminded now of what Rice wrote when Christopher Lee died--I can't find the exact quote but I remember she called him sexy.

This is to say, Interview with the Vampire may have its genesis in postmodernism but it lacks the self-devouring, cynical quality postmodernist fiction usually has. She really loved vampires and the genre and this was her story with her heart in it.

The book was written shortly after the death of Rice's young daughter and it's easy to see how this influenced the character of Claudia. Moreover, the driving impulse of much of the book is an implacable grief. Louis and Claudia's search for answers to their own existence has, for Louis, a spiritual quality. His unsatisfying encounter with a Catholic priest underlines it. Here he is, this extraordinary, terrible creature, and there seems to be no reason for it. Every attempt to find reassurance or a sense of order is met with signs of bleak emptiness. The vast period of time with which he must live with this, the natural brutality of his own nature and the cosmic silence in regard to it, must have in itself been a heavy part of the burden. And I can only imagine all the time Rice dwelt with frustrating silence. It's not unlike Bergman's The Silence or Winter Light.

I was reading Interview again because I think it's a great novel about death and it was what I thought of when my grandmother passed away earlier this year. My grandmother was about the same age as Rice. Interview with the Vampire was the only Anne Rice novel I didn't sell before moving to Japan and it ended up with me in Japan entirely by accident, being in one of the unlabelled boxes of books my grandmother sent to me. It's the same old paperback I read in the '90s when I was in high school. And Anne Rice died near San Diego. Should I look for meaning in all this coincidence? It would be nice to think there is.