Anne Rice turns from atheism
Book ReviewAuthor details faith in non-fiction tome

By John Mark Eberhart Comments 1
Published: October 17, 2008

LOS ANGELES — Ultimately, Anne Rice decided that being an atheist was just too damned hard.

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How could I write about Lestat and Louis and Gabrielle and Armand, these lost souls? I couldn’t just crank out adventures with them. It can’t be done. So I had to stop and consecrate my works to Christ.”
Anne Rice

She had been raised in a devoutly Catholic New Orleans family, and with a child’s eyes and accepting heart had experienced "the beauty of God.”

But years later, as a young woman, she’d found herself filled with questions, doubts. Was the church too rigid, and did it exert too much power over the individual? More important, did God exist?

"I stopped talking to God,” Rice recalls. "I went into atheism with almost a religious passion. I believed it was reality; it had to be faced. The church couldn’t have been correct.”

The years passed. She got married. She had a daughter, but her daughter died of leukemia at age 5. She had a son, Christopher, who lived — and is now a novelist, though not as famous as his mother. How could he be, when Mother is the author of "Interview With the Vampire,” "The Vampire Lestat,” "The Witching Hour” and a host of other international best-sellers?

In the 1990s, though, in her 50s, Rice found herself being pulled back to God. Atheism, it turns out, had been for her not a true expression of logic and reason but an emptiness, even a torment.

"It’s a more strenuous path than the religious path, because you’re then going to say that there is no God, there is no reason (for anything), that people on Earth are the only (way) to provide any meaning. That’s a rough road to travel.

"When you lose a child, you’re telling yourself as an atheist, ‘I’m never going to see that child again in any form.’ That’s a hell of a lot harder than a religion, which gives you the consolation that you will see that child again in heaven. It’s hard being an atheist. It’s tough.”

Rice recounts her religious journey in "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.” It’s the first nonfiction title of her career, and it’s a rather short book, just 256 pages. But its easy elegance is one of its strengths.

As she returned to the faith she’d grown up with, Rice made discoveries not only about religion but also about elements of her own life, including the supernatural novels that brought her millions of fans — the "Vampire Chronicles” and her series of books about an extended family of modern-day witches, the Mayfairs. She now thinks these uncanny books were a spiritual response to her declaration of atheism.

"With the vampires, I was creating a shadow world of (the sacred). The doom of the characters was my grief for my lost faith. And the metaphors were obvious; the blood was a Eucharistic metaphor, though I didn’t think of it that way at the time.”

Those books made her a modern master of horror fiction. But there will be no more books about mummies, witches or vampires from Rice.

"I feel like I’m living in a world now where I will see my daughter again, and I will see the Lord. I talk to Him every day of my life.

"How could I write about Lestat and Louis and Gabrielle and Armand, these lost souls? I couldn’t just crank out adventures with them.

"It can’t be done. So I had to stop and consecrate my works to Christ.”

Three years ago she shocked some readers with "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,” a novel about Jesus’ boyhood based in part on the New Testament Gospels and partly upon biblical scholarship.

A sequel, "The Road to Cana,” saw print this spring, and both books earned favorable reviews.

As for her previous novels featuring vampires, ghosts and so on, she makes no apologies.

"All those books were totally sincere, and they reflect a long journey to Christ. I have never felt those books did harm to people. ... I don’t regret them in any way. What I regret as a Christian is every unkind and mean and inconsiderate thing I ever did to anybody.”

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services