PZ Myers. 2005 Oct 23. Anne Rice loses it. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/anne_rice_loses_it/>. Accessed 2006 Jan 28.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Sunday, October 23, 2005
Anne Rice loses it
Her books have become increasingly unreadable, she recently erupted bizarrely against her critics, but now we have clear evidence that she has gone completely bug-guts insane: Anne Rice has become a fervent Christian. Her next series of books are a life of Christ, written from the hero's point of view. It might work—she can probably handle the part where the narrator thinks he's god, and she's well practiced in writing about the undead. The Vampire Lestat has got nothin' on this Jesus dude.
(via Covington)
Something Positive weighs in.
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I particularly liked this line, describing her preparations for writing a book about Jesus,
"To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship—some of which she found disturbingly skeptical."
Egads! Skepticism about the historical context of stories concerning Our Savior(tm)?! Well I never...
I've never read any of her books. If the movie version Interview with the Vampire was any indication, though, I'll stick with Buffy, thank you very much.#: Posted by on 10/23 at 06:52 PM -
My take on Rice's conversion: Sweet Zombie Jesus
#: Posted by Johnny Logic on 10/23 at 07:04 PM
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I tried reading one of her books once. I think one of teh first two and I found it almost completely unreadable. Given her popularity at the time I assumed, wrongly, that her prose would demonstrate some skill but honestly, I found it alarmingly bad. I think I got through about 50 pages or so.
#: Posted by on 10/23 at 07:12 PM
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Being an atheist doesn't preclude enjoying historical fiction of any kind. One of my favorite books of all time is "Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff" by Christopher Moore. It is hilarious and a very good read if the history of the times around Jesus life interests you.
Personally, the more I learn about the history of christianity the easier it is to be an atheist!
Cheers,#: Posted by on 10/23 at 07:19 PM -
I always knew Jesus was a Vampyr. All that business about eating blood, rising from the dead, andbeing hard to see with mortal eyes...
#: Posted by John Wilkins on 10/23 at 07:42 PM
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It took me a while before I finally believed that Chuck Colson's Watergate-era conversion was genuine, but it seems to have stuck. I think I'll give Rice a grace period, too. Perhaps she was kind of tapped out and just had a brilliant inspiration to reinvent herself and start plowing a new (to her) field.
#: Posted by Zeno on 10/23 at 07:46 PM
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I read the Vamp Chronicles up through Memnoch the Devil, where the Catholic mythology references made me lose interest. Of the books I read, Interview with the Vampire was by far the worst, and I'm told it's because she was mourning the death of a child while she wrote it (and quite likely drunk; sorry, I don't have a reference), which explains a lot. The Lestat books were mostly enjoyable, if you're into vampires and atmosphere. If not, you'd probably hate them.
The conversion news doesn't surprise me that much. As I said, it was the increased Catholic mythology in Memnoch the Devil that turned me off of the series. (One thing did impress me, and I forget which book it was: she clearly had read up on the history of the Celts befors setting a few scenes in ancient Celtic lands)#: Posted by Qalmlea on 10/23 at 08:02 PM -
Ironically, I stopped reading her because I thought she was starting to pander to her fanbase. And, yes, the bad writing became more obvious as the plots became more indulgent.
#: Posted by on 10/23 at 08:29 PM
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Ah well, at least it wasn't a real writer. When Margaret Atwood completely rewrites The Handmaid's Tale to make the theocrats the good guys, then it will be time to worry.
#: Posted by David Sewell on 10/23 at 09:16 PM
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I don't suppose you're a Something Positive reader PZ. I went from here to the latest comic and see this
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp10232005.shtml#: Posted by on 10/23 at 09:31 PM -
Rice has been a pretty regular churchgoing sort for years. The vampire mythos itself has a lot of overlap with the Catholic mythos. I've read some of the books (It was high school, ok?) and she was already too churchy for comfort then. I don't see this as a big change for her.
#: Posted by on 10/23 at 09:33 PM
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I lost interest in the Vampire Chronicles after Memnoch the Devil. One thing that might explain her cranky response to her critics is in one of the links you provide: the death of her husband while she was writing Blood Canticle.
As for what her story might be like, consider this.#: Posted by Orac on 10/23 at 09:57 PM -
I think I got through about 50 pages or so.
You did better than I did by an order of magnitude. I think I got six pages into Interview With the Vampire before giving up on it.#: Posted by on 10/23 at 10:16 PM -
PZ, I liked the phrase "bug-guts insane."
I know what you're REALLY saying. Wink, wink. <chuckle>#: Posted by Hank Fox on 10/23 at 10:42 PM -
Oh dear, I've actually enjoyed some of Anne Rice's books, in the deep dark past, but then I'm a Philistine, for sure. I do note from the linked Amazon rant that she doesn't seem to know how to paragraph, which might indicate that she relies on an editor more than she lets on.
As for Margaret Atwood and Handmaid's Tale which seems more prescient by the day, I've read a number of her subsequent essays, equally prescient, and I think no one need worry about her flipping. She has the US down pat.#: Posted by Wayne on 10/23 at 11:20 PM -
On Attwood - it's also worth noting that she's Canadian, and ergo immune to some of the more worrisome American memes.
Handmaid's Tale was prescient and somewhat far fetched when it was released. I didn't think so, though, because I'd just come out of the evangelical movement... I had seen evidence of that sort of behaviour.
Gilead is pretty obviously the American Midwest, but these days I fear it's also most of the east coast as well.#: Posted by John Wilkins on 10/23 at 11:25 PM -
One thing I've never liked about the Catholic Church is, once it gets its hooks in you, you find it basically impossible to leave forever.
Lost my second girlfriend to them.
Don't even know why they wanted her. She was a hot adult woman, not an 8 yro boy.#: Posted by on 10/24 at 12:26 AM -
Atwood's flipped the other way, finally admitting that some of the books she writes might be... gasp... SF.
#: Posted by on 10/24 at 12:53 AM
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Personally I think there may be a twinge of "cash-in" to this. She's looking at the sales figures for the Left Buttock — erm, Behind — series, and the box office take of Passion of the Christ, and going, "Hmmmm...."
Of course, I haven't read any of her stuff; everyone whose opinions I trust has given a hearty thumbs down, and as my site might indicate, I'm an SF/fantasy guy anyway.#: Posted by Martin Wagner on 10/24 at 01:15 AM -
Considering she also wrote the Taming of Sleeping Beauty, maybe she just has a thing for guys tied to crosses and whipped by men in uniform.
This may end up being the first X-rated take on the gospels....#: Posted by on 10/24 at 01:39 AM -
From the description of the book given in the linked article making the rounds, I rather doubt that Rice's book is going to get an ecstatic money-making embrace from fundievangelical Christians. I just can't see the average fundie liking her getting inside the head of a kid Jesus, for one.
And as far as "still-youthful", I looked at her picture and I said to myself, "my 65 year old mother looks A LOT younger" than the 64-YO Rice. Certainly Mom's got less gray in her hair. Perhaps it's all relative.#: Posted by on 10/24 at 01:41 AM -
Rice said: "I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status,"
Fatal.#: Posted by Bartholomew on 10/24 at 02:49 AM -
Atwood's flipped the other way, finally admitting that some of the books she writes might be... gasp... SF.
In that case, looking forward to Atwood's take on talking squid in outer space! Hmm... talking feminist squid in outer space?#: Posted by on 10/24 at 04:08 AM -
I'd buy them if they were written in the styles of other famous writers. You know:
Raymond Chandler: ("I don't like guys who stone dames - wherever the dames have been running around - so I told them that he who was without sin was going to cast the first stone. I said it while I was holding a rock the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread. I think they got the message.")
Chuck Palahniuk: ("With spikes through both wrists you speak only in howls. In eighteen hours' time the sky over Jerusalem will darken. The veil of the Temple will be rent in twain. I know this because the Logos knows this.")
PG Wodehouse: (from "The Inimitable Judas": "The Earl of Gethsemane's garden was extremely pleasant, with all the fixings a man of taste could require, but I could not help feeling a lurking sense of what-you-may-call-it. Man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, as what's his name says, so it was without too much surprise that I heard Judas give a respectful cough behind me.
"Ah, Judas. More of the chaps arrived?"
"Not precisely, sir. The latest arrivals are a sizeable patrol of Roman legionaries, accompanied by His Reverence the High Priest."
"Egad, Judas! Caiaphas has turned up? That human gumboil?"
He didn't say anything but just raised a sort of sceptical eyebrow. Dashed superior-thinking fellow.")#: Posted by on 10/24 at 06:53 AM -
It's been over 15 years since I read anything by Anne Rice. I can't say I didn't enjoy a few of those books, early in my college years. Part of reading any fiction is suspension of disbelief. I don't really think there are vampires, but I enjoyed the glamorized concept of them just like I'm currently enjoying an old book about elephant-like aliens attempting to invade earth (Footfall). I guess the religion bit is just another fiction tied in with the story to me, so I never had much problem with it. The saddest thing to me is that another person has begun to believe their own fantasies. Think she really believes in the vampires too?
#: Posted by on 10/24 at 07:04 AM
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Anax: Isn't The Last Tempetation of Christ the first X-rated take on the gospels? (If not, I am sure it has been done anyway.)
#: Posted by Keith Douglas on 10/24 at 07:31 AM
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Somewhere...somewhere...I have a drawing of Bram Stoker beating the hell out of Anne Rice. He has her in a headlock and is about to drive a stake through her black heart.
#: Posted by on 10/24 at 08:55 AM
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I remember The Last Temptation of Christ not being all that X-rated (and, for that matter, being very slow and overlong). The offense to the pious was mostly conceptual.
#: Posted by Matt McIrvin on 10/24 at 09:06 AM
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I've never read any Anne Rice, so I have no opinion on her writing. I find it hard to imagine, however, that it beats Steven Brust's Agyar in the romanticized vampire genre.
#: Posted by on 10/24 at 09:18 AM
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This fictionalization is probably going to help convince some of the gullible.
But I wonder: is it possible that the mass-media commercialization of Jesus, by Rice and those Left Behind authors, etc., is actually going to WEAKEN the mystical hold all this has on people?
In other words, though there will always be the Christian equivalent of Trekkies, who'd fanatically suck up any story you told them about Jesus and accept it as perfectly true, will there also be a growing crop of skeptics?
Because they come to understand that ALL of the stories are made-up?#: Posted by Hank Fox on 10/24 at 09:34 AM -
Ajay: Those were hilarious! More please...
#: Posted by Stephen Frug on 10/24 at 10:05 AM
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Would it be churlish of me to point out that she gave herself 5 stars on her Amazon review?
#: Posted by on 10/24 at 10:11 AM
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Aw, thanks, Stephen.
Well, there's always Frank Miller:
"Wrists and ankles pierced.
Back scourged.
Everything fading out.
Come on, old man.
Don't go into shock. Don't go into shock.
Son of God dies. World gets saved.
Fair trade."
Or Anthony Burgess:
"What's it going to be, then?
We are sitting in the upstairs of Matthias' house, that is me and my twelve droogs, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, James the Less, Judas Iscariot, Simon Peter, Andrew, Matthew, Thomas, Simon the Zealot and Thaddeus, and drinking wine plus, which is wine with a little extra..."
Or Damon Runyon:
"I am at Big Sol's wedding, which is a highly respectable occasion, and many of the town's leading stiffs and their dolls are in attendance and doing their best to drink up as much of Big Sol's wine as they can, which is no small amount, Big Sol being the kind of guy who is well connected in the liquor business, when I notice a country looking guy in the corner and his ever-loving mother is telling him that Big Sol has run out of wine, and since the country looking guy is even better connected in the liquor business than Big Sol is, maybe he should do something about it before the assorted guys decide to take a bit of fresh air on Big Sol, which would cause him no small amount of embarrassment. The country looking guy ponders for a bit with a ten-dollar frown on his upperworks and asks for some water, and at this point I become very interested, because many of the guys at this wedding are not the sort of guys who will take well to being offered water, especially not when they are already well oiled more or less with Big Sol's wine..."#: Posted by on 10/24 at 11:01 AM -
I haven't read any of Rice's books, having become addicted to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's good-guy vampire Count Saint-Germain (beginning with Hotel Transylvania. Yarbrto's hero would be enjoyed my many on this blog--he's an atheist, based on his 3,500 years of undead experience, but respectful of others' beliefs. Yarbro's vampires are not supernatural, but their existence is more tsken for granted as a natural phenomenon than explained.
I don't know why Yarbro's books aren't better known. She writes well, and has clearly done quite a bit of historical research for each book.#: Posted by on 10/24 at 11:22 AM -
I like Yarbro very much, but haven't read one in, what, 15-20 years? They're hard to find anymore.
I have read Rice, and have even read several all the way through. They were interesting for their florid style at first, and I think she retained her fan base with the self-indulgent pity party that is the main focus of many of them (hmmm, martyr complex -- maybe this shift to Catholicism is a natural), and completely lost me when all the action stopped and the books became hundreds of pages of whining.
There are some other good vampire books. George RR Martin's Fevre Dream is a favorite, and S.P. Somtow has written some interesting stuff, although they're heavy on the gore.
There are others that are even worse. Laurell K. Hamilton is an example of an author in this genre who is inexplicably popular, replacing the goth self-pity of Rice with the most ridiculous Mary Sue preening egotism and plotless vanity props.#: Posted by PZ Myers on 10/24 at 11:35 AM -
Well, there's always Frank Miller:
I love you.
"Mary Magdalene. She says her name is Mary Magdalene."#: Posted by on 10/24 at 11:45 AM -
My problem with Rice was that I found her wirting boring as all get-out, and I was appalled when I read one of her mummy books (I think? Something with an Egytptian theme) that it didn't seem very well researched. It was like she was just pulling it all out of her backside. I thought that the Mummy movies with Brendan Fraser were better researched!
#: Posted by Tlazolteotl on 10/24 at 12:15 PM
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Like it. I think it was George Macdonald Fraser who pointed out that he had seen the sort of muscle that Middle Eastern moneychangers employ, and if Christ had actually turned a load of them out of the Temple, he must have been a good deal, well, bulkier than he is normally depicted.
So, yes, more Marv than Pre-Raphaelite.
Edgar Allan Poe:
"The pale light of the early morning had only begun to paint the sky as I approached the fateful tomb. And it was with growing horror that I observed - I can scarcely write it, even now, without trembling! - that the stone had been rolled aside, and that the pallid gravecloths within were lying disturbed and empty! He had risen from the dead!"
Arthur Conan Doyle: "'I confess, Jesus,' I said, leaning back in the railway compartment as we sped back towards Jerusalem, 'I still do not entirely follow your reasoning. What exactly was the significance of the parable of the wheat and the tares?'
Jesus paused from lighting a pipeful of shag and regarded me with level eyes. 'You will dismiss it as simple when I explain it, Simon,' he remarked. 'And indeed it was simplicity itself...
'And you are forgetting the curious incident of the foolish virgins in the night time.'
'The foolish virgins did nothing in the night time.'
'That was the curious incident,' Jesus remarked."#: Posted by on 10/24 at 12:26 PM -
Ajay, you, as the youth say, rock!
I read the Vampire Chronicles up to Memnoch the Devil (even though she'd already lost me with the stupidity of The Tale of the Body Thief). Being a lapsed Catholic and a philosophy major at the time, I read Memnoch as Rice basically ripping off people like Pascal and Nietzsche--i.e., theists and atheists far more eloquent than her.
Laurell K. Hamilton's popularity is a puzzler. The first few books were OK, but then she also got to the point where she didn't have an editor anymore. She tries to do that noir-style first person narration, but Anita Blake is such a transparent and tactless character, there's no point in using that device. First paragraph: I looked at him, as thoughts of killing him danced through my head. Second paragraph: "Why are you looking at me like that?" he said. "I'm thinking of killing you," I responded sweetly. Blech.
Here's a librarian's tip to the wise: You can judge books by their covers. When the author's name becomes bigger than the title of the book, walk away. At that point, the author herself has become the "brand," and you can bet the publisher didn't bother editing at all, knowing that the author could sneeze on a piece of paper and sell 100,000 copies.#: Posted by on 10/25 at 09:31 AM -
... judging from Rice's previous works, especially _Exit to Eden_ and _The Taming of Sleeping Beauty_, I'll bet that her Jesus ends up *liking* the flogging. Every single one of her books that I've read (and I had read a handful in high school) focused on sado-masochistic sexual pleasure. ... hey, she had also written about the homosexual practices of Catholic priests in one of her books, I don't remember which one.
Old habits are hard to break.
Who knows, the written product of the official allegiance between Catholicism and her sexual preferences might be interesting.
I'm not buying any of her books, though.#: Posted by on 10/25 at 09:58 AM -
Aw, c'mon - Rice is just jealous because Mel Gibson got more gore in his "Passion" flick than she's been able to squeeze into any of her books.
I'm glad to see PZ mention George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream; Lucius Shepherd's The Golden is another worthy title from a serious sf/fantasy writer. That said, my favorite sub-genre in this field is the vampire-on-Mars story, for which Tanith Lee's Sabella and Jack Butler (no relation)'s Nightshade are exemplary.#: Posted by on 10/25 at 08:43 PM -
Alexandre Dumas (most successful black author in history)?
"In the late spring of the year 3-, the town of Jerusalem, the birthplace of the author of the Psalms, was in such an uproar that one might almost believe a second Maccabee rising to be in progress.
That morning, a young man on an extraordinary mount might have been observed proceeding slowly through a jubilant crowd in the direction of the city gate..."
Agatha Christie?
"Mes amis, I will not detain you long. I have called you together into this inn for a simple reason: one of the people here will betray me!"
Running out of inspiration here...#: Posted by on 10/26 at 03:36 AM -
If a writer speaks against religion, he or she is attacked. If a writer speaks for a religion, he or she is attacked. There are name-calling morons on both sides. Mrs. Rice has a right to speak, as anyone else.
#: Posted by on 11/11 at 04:02 PM