Anne Rice writes for god

[Misery_Chick]

The Gospel According to Anne
The queen of the occult has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God—and writing her most daring book yet.
By David Gates
Newsweek

Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Sometimes Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end—and neither would you. Glass doors open onto a terrace that looks over the red-tiled roofs of La Jolla, Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in staffer brings meals to the table at the foot of her ornately carved wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone fireplace. She exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and enough books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The New York Times every morning—"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me"—watches news "till I can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a half a day e-mailing with her extraordinarily faithful readers.

They've been worried about her. After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there—and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.

Meeting the still youthful-looking Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill—except that on a warm October afternoon she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing. And if you were expecting Morticia Addams with a strange new light in her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee," she says, beckoning you to where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth. "We're from New Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."

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. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it—or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.

Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan—smiling, then weeping, then raging—Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.

Rice already has much of the next volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk about it.") But what's she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the best lines.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

© 2005 MSNBC.com


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9785289/site/newsweek/

Thoughts????

Big controversy on the other board I go to. I'm of the thought that it's going to be very controversial. Many Christians are not going to like Anne putting words in the mouth of Christ. Nobody really argues this point.

Here's the part where the part where many disagree with me. - I also think good for her, not a christian myself but I think what ever it takes to get you through. She's had a lot of lose in her life and been struggling with her faith for a long time. If this path works for her great.

[junkie christ]

Big controversy on the other board I go to. I'm of the thought that it's going to be very controversial. Many Christians are not going to like Anne putting words in the mouth of Christ. Nobody really argues this point. .

then they arent christians.
real christians say that gods the only judge
theres so many hypochristians out there, and they outnumber the real thing so bad, some of the truths get lost

its actually for reasons like that, this is gonna be the first anne rice book i finish reading.

[Bone]

No big suprises here to me... Been seeing this coming since "mimnoch the devil" - The last Anne Rice book I will probably ever buy.

Most likely won't read this one either.
Intresting premise she is working with on this one though.
Depending on her approach - Could be the "Last Temptation of Christ" movie boycotts all over again. "How dare anyone suppose what Jesus would think"
Might have to watch reactions to how this one is received by the Christian Right.... Could be entertaining.

[junkie christ]

Might have to watch reactions to how this one is
received by the Christian Right.... Could be entertaining.

if they notice at all. i mean they probably have people that just hunt this kinda shit until its a slow propaganda... fuck i mean news.. day.


im reading this book for the same reason i watch fox news.
to know what dumb shit the extreme right is gonna come up with next.
i just hate they get ratings so i can hear their perversions of reality.

but i gotta do it to fight them off, same reason ill read this book.

[Coor]

Meh...i think she's overrated...Just a personal view of course...The first 2 books were ok...but after that I just lost intrest...

[Misery_Chick]

I think some of her books are great (some did have a profound effect on me....the malady of mortally- that hit me hard.) some I never finished. I really think my question was. "What do you think about her new found religiousness?"

Cop out?

Hypocrisy?

Sincere?

Delusional?

Why the fuck do I care?..whatever you need to get you through.

[abreeskye]

Thanks for posting this This is the first I've heard of it...

I will definitely read them...

Religion intrigues me.

I loved Memnoch the Devil...it's my fave anne rice book.

I haven't read every book of hers....I couldn't make it through the Armand book, even though I tried REALLY hard.

[junkie christ]

I think some of her books are great (some did have a profound effect on me....the malady of mortally- that hit me hard.) some I never finished. I really think my question was. "What do you think about her new found religiousness?"

Cop out?

Hypocrisy?

Sincere?

Delusional?

Why the fuck do I care?..whatever you need to get you through.

my question who gives a shit about her new found religion
we dont know her personally? not our fucking concern?
its all a media matter at this point
and i hate the fucking media.

[Onibubba]

We've been discussing this on the SG boards too. I say let her write what she likes. I have not cared for anything of hers other than the first 3 Vampire books and the Beauty Trilogy, but maybe she will be reinvigorated with this.

It is alway odd when a writer or musician alienates so many of their fans simply by changing or growing. Stagnant people tend to get, well, boring. Change and consideration of other opinions and views is a good thing isn't it?

[badkiity]

* Sigh* I have been disappointed by Anne Rice every since I stood in line for 6 hours to get my book signed and then had to leave. Then later heard from my friend that she just signed my book and tossed it back to them without a glance and said here ya go. * Dismissed!*So I used to be a big fan. I will still ocassionally read something from the Vampire Chronicles but I have other authors that I prefer to read.

[shadow dancer]

To each their own. I know nothing about her other than the fact that it seems that she hasn't exactly had an easy life with the loss of the husband and daughter as well as some of the health problems that she has had. Of course, on the other hand, she has had incredible fame with her writing. At a point and time in everyone's life, I think he/she goes searching for some type of "religion" and maybe this is her way of finding it or the outcome of having discovered something about it or herself.

Will I read it? Probably not.

As for her other books, they've had their ups and downs in my opinion.

I have been disappointed by Anne Rice every since I stood in line for 6 hours to get my book signed and then had to leave. Then later heard from my friend that she just signed my book and tossed it back to them without a glance and said here ya go. * Dismissed!*

I'm not sure if you are talking about the signing in Knoxville or not, but yes, her attitude pretty well sucked that night. It was actually kind of sad how she treated some of her fans.

[badkiity]

Yes. That was the night. Very disappointing.