"Interview With the Vampire" author talks new book "Prince Lestat"

PanARMENIAN.Net - When Anne Rice published "Interview With the Vampire" in 1976, she didn't just launch her own vampire series - her sexy tragic vampire antiheroes launched an entirely new genre, LA Times reports.

The phrase paranormal romance "didn't exist when I wrote the vampire novels in the beginning," Rice says in an interview with LA Times. But the genre, she adds, "is here to stay." Indeed, after an 11-year break, the grande dame of vampire fiction has revived her famous vampire clan with "Prince Lestat."

That supernatural romance has become a flourishing part of pop culture has been a blessing and a curse. The field is crowded with hits like "Twilight" and "True Blood," and countless other television shows, movies, graphic novels and books, and for a long time, Rice avoided it all. "I was always frightened of being too influenced, and I would get blocked," she admits.

She explains that she thought she had closed the book on her "Vampire Chronicles" with 2003's "Blood Canticle." After that, she allowed herself to enjoy other people's vampire stories. "I got less scared in my 60s.... I came to realize we all make our own cosmology, and there are certain traits that are common to all of the fiction in this area. I just grew up."

Emotional maturity aside, the 73-year-old author has some of the habits of a teenager — and she spends hours a day on Facebook. Unlike most teenagers, her Facebook page has 1.1 million fans. Rice is so engaged — linking to news stories, asking provocative questions and responding to comments — that some don't believe it's actually the author.

The Anne Rice of today does seem different from the one a fan might have met years ago. She sold her grand New Orleans mansion, the three-story, 47,000-square foot former orphanage she'd restored, and lives in relative quiet in Palm Desert.

In her new novel, vampires live in the modern world, listening to Internet radio and ducking cellphone paparazzi. Most of them have figured out how to use immortality to their financial advantage, and live in luxurious surroundings. And yet there is a threat that seems to be converging on them from all sides — crowds of young vampires keep getting torched, a terrifying and complete death.

"I agonize over some of the dark and cruel things that I write. I want them, for me, to be effective and authentic and dramatic and moral, I guess," she says.

When she lived in Berkeley in the 1960s and '70s, Rice says, she used to debate with her friends about the demands of art. "If great art is really great art, it shouldn't depress you. We would argue about, like, the movie 'The Blue Angel': Is it depressing or is it uplifting? If it's great art, it should be so uplifting that you come out of it feeling joy."

She explains that she gave up on "Breaking Bad" because it was too depressing. So is she in the uplifting camp?

"Not necessarily. I can't resolve it," she says. That kind of tension — between tragedy and transcendence — is what it takes to spend half a lifetime writing stories of the glamorous undead.