Anne Rice

Anne Rice was an American author who reinvented vampire fiction with Interview with the Vampire (1976), told from the perspective of the tormented, guilt-ridden vampire Louis rather than a human observer, and launched with it the Vampire Chronicles, the series that made Rice one of gothic horror's most influential modern voices. Across more than a dozen Vampire Chronicles novels, Rice built out an elaborate vampire mythology centered on the charismatic, morally ambiguous Lestat de Lioncourt, treating vampirism as a lens for exploring faith, mortality, sexuality, and alienation rather than pure horror. Rice extended her gothic universe further with the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy, following a New Orleans family cursed across generations by a spirit named Lasher, and later merged her vampire and witch mythologies together in the New Tales of the Vampires and Mayfair Witches crossovers. Late in her career she launched Ramses the Damned, a series reviving an immortal ancient Egyptian pharaoh, co-writing its later volumes with her son, novelist Christopher Rice, who has continued the series since her death. A former convert to and later public critic of organized Catholicism, Rice wove religious longing and doubt through much of her fiction. She died in December 2021, leaving behind one of modern horror's most widely adapted and enduringly popular bodies of work, including the 2022 AMC television adaptation of Interview with the Vampire.