Honest Book Reviews by Namsu: Anne Rice

Biography

Anne Rice was an American novelist of gothic fiction, sexual literature, and Christian literature who was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien on October 4, 1941, and passed away on December 11, 2021. Her most well-known work was the Vampire Chronicles saga. Two films based on The Vampire Chronicles were released: Interview with the Vampire in 1994 and Queen of the Damned in 2002.

Anne Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, where she spent most of her youth before moving to Texas and eventually San Francisco. She grew up in a devout Catholic home but eventually converted to agnosticism. She began her professional literary career in 1976 with the release of Interview with the Vampire, and in the 1980s, she began penning sequels to the masterpiece.

Anne Rice wrote the books Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana in the mid-2000s, following a reported conversion to Catholicism. They are fictitious depictions of significant events in Jesus' life. She dissociated herself from organized Christianity some years later, citing disagreements with the Catholic Church's positions on social issues but vowing that trust in God would continue to be "crucial to her existence." She went on to call herself a secular humanitarian.

Anne Rice mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle, the Bront sisters, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, John Milton, H. Rider Haggard, Henry James, Stephen King, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, and William Shakespeare as influences on her work. She said she kept coming back to King's Firestarter for inspiration "When I'm stuck, I read the novel Firestarter. Reading the opening few pages of Firestarter is a good way to get me started."

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