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In her 6-year career, Anne Rice has never stopped inventing and re-inventing.
When I was a kid, Anne Rice was everywhere.
Just like Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell and other best-selling idols, her books are decorated with the rotating shelves of every supermarket, the table of every price club, and the must-have of every bookstore. Reading stand. A large number of "Witcher Moments" and "Cursed Queen" are piled on the bedside tables of relatives, and the parents of friends hide the paperback copy of "Vampire Leicester" in the closet. Even before I knew who she was and what she really wrote, this woman and her seemingly endless novels about vampires, witches and other dark creatures have become part of my life, and seeing them everywhere makes me think Know: How can anyone write so many things about the same thing?
But nothing more: Anne Rice has never written about the same thing twice, which is not the case.
My parents had heard too many suspicious things about Rice's novels when I was a teenager, and they refused to let me read her parents' wishes, so I was determined to find out. In the end, thanks to Neil Jordan’s wonderful interview with vampire movies and lucky enough to find the first four books of the vampire chronicles in the family courtyard auction, I entered Rice’s dark world. When I got there, I found that this is one of the most daring popular writers I have ever met. Even according to the creative standards of genre novels, she dared to make a huge leap in her characters and myths in every book. . As a teenager, this is enough to set my brain on fire.
If you know any story about Anne Rice, you will know "Interview with a Vampire", this is her debut novel, developed from her short story, and eventually became one of the most popular stories in all vampire novels . On the surface, this is a fairly simple novel with a good conceptual hook: the vampire agreed to be interviewed and told the story of his life. This is the kind of thing readers of popular novels are going to devour, but it also sets a timetable for the confession, deep emotional nature of Rice’s novels, and through Claudia (inspired by Rice’s own daughter, she Died very young) and her Byronic idol Lestat de Lioncourt, which established a world that Rice will eventually weave into an epic.
But of course, Rice did not immediately publish more than 10 series of books about her vampires. First, she turned to historical novels, writing novels about free people of color in Louisiana and Italian opera singers. Those books did not become popular like interviews, so Rice finally returned to the world of her debut with the vampire Lester, which promised to tell the life story of the interviewed opponent. Although "Interview" put her at the top, it was this book, and the way she chose to tell Lestat's story, that determined how she managed her bold creative career.
The vampire Leicester, you see, did tell the story of Leicester as an arrogant French nobleman in his early years. His fierce spirit attracted a vampire and gave him a gift of darkness, but Rice may have been restrained during the interview. She disappeared when she revealed it. After the first novel, Lester slept in the dust of New Orleans, but was awakened again by the rehearsal of rock bands in the 1980s. Lester stood up, claimed that the band was his own, made himself a charming lead singer, and decided to live his life in public, arousing the anger of other vampires along the way. This is a thrilling and intoxicating fusion of young and old (interviews helped set the template), opera and punk, melancholy and joy. This is a landmark work in supernatural fiction. She could easily imitate her style as a dozen books, and she has been on the bestseller list every time.
On the contrary, Rice somehow went further in the next vampire chronicle novel, showing us the secret origins of all vampires through "The Cursed Queen", and turning Leicester into A new human form was created, and her hero was sent to meet the literal demon in the fifth book of the series, "Devil Mennock". At the same time, in other parts of her novel, she is constructing a parallel dark world, which includes the "Mayfair Witch's Biography" trilogy, about a powerful family, the dark spirit that haunts them, and is closely related to their destiny. Books of strange supernatural species. The original Mayfair trilogy was not as widely known as the Vampire Chronicles, but as the children said, real people knew it.
But even so, Rice's bold, endless and capricious bibliography did not end. She wrote about the mummy, her own views on that particular supernatural subtype, wrote eroticism under a pseudonym, tried stories about ghosts and titans, and kept her vampire narrative. In the early 2000s, she notoriously announced that she had completed all of this and would begin to devote all her creative energy to novels about the life of Jesus Christ. Many readers think this is a contradiction or even a betrayal, but in retrospect, it is a bold and imaginative statement. It is one of the most popular writers in the world. It basically says "Try to stop me". Believe it or not, the two novels of the Lord Christ ultimately suit her classics, because it is full of explorations of faith. Power and doubt.
Rice's later years were a period of seemingly endless creative exploration, inspired by her final personal conclusion that she could once again surpass her writing of the book of Christ Jesus. She wrote novels about angels and werewolves, returned to erotic books in her Sleeping Beauty series, wrote the sequel to "The Mummy", and reselected the Vampire Chronicles with the Prince of Leicester, this story launched a renewal Defining the trilogy of novels and reconstructing the entire epic for a new generation of readers. Some cynics will tell you that she did this because her other literary creations did not attract readers like vampires, but I think this is not true. I think that in a career full of reshaping, she cannot resist the last chance to turn a new narrative to her masterpiece.
Many popular writers maintain their popularity by finding a line, sticking to it, and learning to do better than anyone else on the market, whether it's military novels, detective novels, or romantic times. Anne Rice was crowned the queen of vampire novels with "Vampire Lester" in 1985, and she could have easily devoted the rest of her literary career to making copies of that book with great results. But like many of her vampires, she was never satisfied. Like them, her life is defined as the constant search for the next great philosophical, emotional or psychological discovery, the next thing that will cheer her up and keep her creative blood flowing. These new discoveries are not always as effective as the old ones, but she never stops searching, never stops digging deeper, digging them for herself and us, this is why she will be remembered. This is what makes her immortal.
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