RIP Anne Rice

News has broken that fantasy and horror author Anne Rice has passed away following complications from a stroke at the age of 80.

Anne Rice was born in New Orleans in 1941 and was of Irish Catholic descent. Her family moved to Texas after the death of her mother, and she also lived and worked in San Francisco and Berkley. She started writing as a teenager and studied literary criticism, but became disenchanted with dissecting fiction in favour of writing it.

In 1968 she wrote a supernatural short story featuring vampires. In 1973, whilst grieving the death of her daughter at the age of six, Rice reworked the story into a novel called Interview with the Vampire. The book was published in 1976, attracting immediate sales but a mixed critical reception. Rice did not proceed with an immediate sequel, instead writing historical fiction (The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven) and erotic novels under pseudonyms. In 1985 she returned to her supernatural world with The Vampire Lestat (1985) and The Queen of the Damned (1988). This expanded into a series called The Vampire Chronicles, which eventually encompassed thirteen novels. The most recent, Blood Communion, was published in 2018.

Rice mixed in other books, writing a series about the life of Jesus Christ and another series called Songs of the Seraphim. Although raised as a Catholic, she moved away from religious faith in later life, but renewed her faith after a series of health scares between 1998 and 2004 and the death of her husband in 2002. She did not return to organised religion, criticising the Catholic Church for its stance on social issues, but reaffirmed her belief in God and Jesus, both in her public speeches and in her fiction.

Her personal and sales profile received an immense boost from the release of the film Interview with the Vampire in 1994, starring Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst and Brad Pitt. The film brought her work to a much wider, international readership and catapulted her books up the sales charts. As of 2012, her total lifetime book sales had reached 150 million, making her one of the biggest-selling authors in the SFF sphere of all time.

Rice was not above controversy. In 2004, she responded to poor reviews of her novel Blood Canticle by attacking negative reviewers on Amazon and demanding that Amazon remove all negative reviews of the book. She also expressed a vehement dislike of fanfiction, to the point of threatening fanfic writers using her characters with legal action, and in 2015 she launched an attack on "cancel culture." She even got into a public war of words with the founder of Popeye's Chicken, which ended with him adding menu items named after her. Rice also at various stages angrily refused to be edited, noting in a New York Times article that it was unnecessary because she self-edited as she went along.

Rice arguably did more than any other author to explode the genre of supernatural romance and supernatural fantasy into the mainstream.