Sucking the Life Out of Christ

I remember reading Interview with the Vampire as a sophmore in third period World Civilization, quietly poring over every word of the scene under the Theater Des Vampires. A young boy "pressed his sex" into Louis' leg, and I surreptitiously slid a biology text to hide my own. Still struggling with my sexuality, Anne Rice's works were my first window into homo-eroticism and love between two men, undead as they were.

I rifled through the series, devouring the Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, and the Tale of the Body Thief. In Memnoch the Devil, Rice rediscovered Jesus.

It was all downhill from there.

In her early works, the purple prose dripped from the pages, and yet Rice infused it with a kind of elegance. Lush descriptions crafted a carefully wrought dream, allowing the reader to slide gently through the text. With the appearance of Memnoch, Rice discarded much of her descriptive power in the name of evangelizing for Jesus. Page after tedious page of The Bible According to Anne. While her reconciliation of the Christian faith with evolution was kind of interesting, everyone knew the series had peaked.

Characters began to behave oddly. Entire chapters and books started making little to no sense. The prose descended into pure excrement, capped off with the god-awful Blood Canticle, featuring a two hundred year old vampire draining victims in between exclamations of "Yo!" and "Dude!. Our anti-hero, Lestat, obsesses over becoming a saint. If you had not previously known Anne rediscovered her Catholic faith, the bludgeonous rants in the text made sure you learned right quick.

When readers pointed out Rice had hit rock bottom, we received the author's full-fledged nervous breakdown in the Amazon reviews.

Now, Ms. Rice has made her Catholic transition complete.

In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.

Well, at least she's writing for someone, because she hasn't been for her readers in quite some time. Somehow, I suspect it will require the patience of the Almighty to suffer through this literary crucifixion.

Personally, I'd rather endure one of her son's "novels."

Which is really saying something.

Comments

[Hanuman]

I couldn't agree more. After Memnoch, I gave up on her....

[Bill Hicks]

Yes Anne Rice's books were erotic!

Hey, I like your blog. Maybe we could link our blogs. Mine is www.billsbitterpills.blogspot.com.

Let me know.

[MT]

I'm not sure I agree. I loved Memnoch because most of all because of the infusion of religion. After having it beaten into my head through twelve years of catholic school, I thought her take on religion really humanized it. I'm not particularly religious these days, but as a piece of fiction, I absolutely devoured that book. If you look back she alluded to what was to come in Body Thief. That was when she first introduced her idea of the devil in the scene where David describes seeing him arguing with God in a sidewalk cafe. I thought it was a fascinating take.

[Robbie]

I thought the ideas in Memnoch were interesting enough, having been raised Catholic myself. However, that's really when her actual writing began to flag. I found myself skimming page after page because the prose had become boring.

The books that followed suffered similarly. While Rice has always placed emphasis on her historical research, she began going off on tangents that had little or nothing to do with the actual story. As the BratQueen mentions in one of the links, this is the author who stopped the narrative in Armand cold to discuss shipping routes.

Perhaps more unforgiveably, the consistency began to seriously wane as she published more books. First it was from book to book, and then the novels were no longer consistent within themselves.

You should read the BratQueen's (hilarious) take down of a single chapter of Merrick to get a good view of how Rice's writing has degenerated over time. All her later novels have been like this:

http://www.wtftbq.com/rants/merriquemst.htm

[Christine]

I like some of Rice´s works and elegance of purple prose (hooray for purple prose!), but I am not big fan.