Anne Rice, American bestselling writer, dies at 80

Anne 2

Anne Rice

By Nehru Odeh

Anne Rice, American bestselling writer and author of Interview with the Vampire, has died.

She died on Saturday due to complications resulting from a stroke, her son, Christopher Rice, who is also a writer, announced on Rice’s Facebok page. She was 80 years old.

“This is Anne’s son Christopher and it breaks my heart to bring you this sad news. Earlier tonight, Anne passed away due to complications resulting from a stroke. She left us almost nineteen years to the day my father, her husband Stan, died. The immensity of our family’s grief cannot be overstated,” he said.

“As my mother, her support for me was unconditional — she taught me to embrace my dreams, reject conformity and challenge the dark voices of fear and self-doubt. As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions,” Christopher, who was at his mother’s beside when she died, maintained.

“In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage, awash in memories of a life that took us from the fog laced hills of the San Francisco Bay Area to the magical streets of New Orleans to the twinkling vistas of Southern California.”

Rice’s biggest success was her first novel, “Interview with the Vampire,” which was published in 1976 and introduced the character of the vampire Lestat, who would be the central character in the 13-book Vampire Chronicles series, the most recent of which was published in 2018.

“I had an idea of Lestat as the man of action, the man who could do things that I couldn’t do,” Rice said in a talk at Southern Illinois University in 2010.

“Interview with the Vampire” was made into a successful feature film in 1994, helping to reignite interest in the vampire genre which continued with the TV series “The Vampire Diaries” and the “Twilight” film series.

Although she lived most of her life in California, Rice was a native of New Orleans and set many of her stories there, according to her website biography.

“Rice will be buried in a private ceremony in New Orleans, with a public memorial planned next year,” Christopher said.

 

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