The Feast of All Saints (from Ballantine Books 16th Printing, 1991): In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern history.  For though they were descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who had enslaved them.  They were the gens de couleur libre - the Free People of Color - and in this dazzling historical novel, Anne Rice chronicles the lives of four of their number, men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.

Servant of the Bones (Ballantine Trade Edition, August 1997): "My name is Azriel," he said, sitting by the bed.  "They called me the Servant of the Bones," he said, "but I became a rebel ghost, a bitter and impudent genii...."

"Azriel, you must tell me everything."

Having created fantastic universes of vampires and witches, the incomparable Anne Rice now carries us into new realms of the mystical and the magical - and into the presence of a dark and luminous new hero: the powerful, witty, smiling Azriel, Servant of the Bones.  He is a ghost, demon, angel - in love with the good, in thrall to evil.  He pours out his heart to us, telling his astonishing story when he finds himself - in present day New York City - a dazed witness to the murder of a young girl and inexplicably obsessed by the desire avenge her.

Then he takes us back to his mortal youth in the magnificent city of Babylon, where he is plucked from death by evil priests and sorceresses and transformed into a genii commanded to do their bidding. Challenging these forces of destruction, Azriel embarks on his perilous journey through time - from Babylon's hanging gardens to the Europe of the Black Death to Manhattan in the 1990's. And as his quest approaches its climatic horror, he dares to use and to risk his supernatural powers in the hope of forestalling a world-threatening conspiracy, and redeeming, at last, what was denied him so long ago: his own eternal human soul.

Violin (First Ballantine Trade Edition, August 1998): While grieving the death of her husband, Triana falls prey to the demonic fiddler Stefan, a tormented ghost of a Russian aristocrat who uses his magic violin first to enchant, then to dominate and draw her into a state of madness.

But Triana understands the power of the music perhaps even more than Stefan - and she sets out to resist him and to fight, not only for her sanity, but for her life. The struggle draws them both into a terrifying supernatural realm where they find themselves surrounded by memories, by horrors, and by overwhelming truths. Battling desperately, they are at last propelled toward the novel's astonishing and unforgettable climax.

The Wolf Gift (2012)
The Wolves of Midwinter (2013)

The Wolf Gift (from Amazon.com): When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it's at the behest of the home's enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably attacked--bitten--by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions. Why has he been given the wolf gift? What is its true nature--good or evil? And are there others out there like him?

The Wolves of Midwinter (from Amazon.com): The tale of THE WOLF GIFT continues...

In Anne Rice's surprising and compelling best-selling novel, the first of her strange and mythic imagining of the world of wolfen powers ("I devoured these pages... As solid and engaging as anything she has written since her early vampire chronicle fiction" --Alan Cheuse, The Boston Globe; "A delectable cocktail of old-fashioned lost-race adventure, shape-shifting and suspense" --Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post), readers were spellbound as Rice imagined a daring new world set against the wild and beckoning California coast.

Now in her new novel, as lush and romantic in detail and atmosphere as it is sleek and steely in storytelling, Anne Rice brings us once again to the rugged coastline of Northern California, to the grand mansion at Nideck Point--to further explore the unearthly education of her transformed Man Wolf.

The novel opens on a cold, gray landscape. It is the beginning of December. Oak fires are burning in the stately flickering hearths of Nideck Point. It is Yuletide. For Reuben Golding, now infused with the wolf gift and under the loving tutelage of the Morphenkinder, this Christmas promises to be like no other...as he soon becomes aware that the Morphenkinder, steeped in their own rituals, are also celebrating the Midwinter Yuletide festival deep within Nideck forest.

From out of the shadows of the exquisite mansion comes a ghosttormented, imploring, unable to speak yet able to embrace and desire with desperate affection... As Reuben finds himself caught up with the passions and yearnings of this spectral presence and the preparations for the Nideck town Christmas reach a fever pitch, astonishing secrets are revealed, secrets that tell of a strange netherworld, of spirits--centuries old--who possess their own fantastical ancient histories and taunt with their dark, magical powers...

From the Hardcover edition.

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Ramses the Damned

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (1989)
Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (with Christopher Rice) (2017)
Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris (with Christopher Rice) (2022)

The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned (Ballantine Books First Mass Market Edition, October 1991): Ramses the Great Lives...but having drunk the elixir of life, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied. Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes the close companion of a voluptuous heiress, Julie Stratford, who is the center of a group of jaded aristocrats with appetites of their own to appease.

But the pleasures Ramses enjoys with Julie cannot soothe him. Searing memories of his last reawakening, at the behest of Cleopatra, his beloved Queen of Egypt, burn in his immortal soul. And his intense longing for her, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger...

Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra (from Amazon.com): From the iconic, bestselling author of The Vampire Chronicles, Ramses the Great, former pharaoh of Egypt, is reawakened by the elixir of life in Edwardian England. Now immortal with his bride-to-be, he is swept up in a fierce and deadly battle of wills and psyches against the once-great Queen Cleopatra.

In this mesmerizing, glamorous tale of ancient feuds and modern passions, Ramses has reawakened Cleopatra with the same perilous elixir whose unworldly force brings the dead back to life. But as these ancient rulers defy one another in their quest to understand the powers of the strange elixir, they are haunted by a mysterious presence even older and more powerful than they, a figure drawn forth from the mists of history who possesses spectacular magical potions and tonics eight millennia old. This is a figure who ruled over an ancient kingdom stretching from the once-fertile earth of the Sahara to the far corners of the world, a queen with a supreme knowledge of the deepest origins of the elixir of life.

She may be the only one who can make known to Ramses and Cleopatra the key to their immortality, and the secrets of the miraculous, unknowable, endless expanse of the universe.

Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris (from Amazon.com): The gilded adventures of Ramses the Damned, iconic creation of the legendary bestselling author, continue in this breathtakingly suspenseful tale of a titanic supernatural power unleashed on the eve of war.

A pharaoh made immortal by a mysterious and powerful elixir, Ramses the Great became counselor and lover to some of Egypt's greatest and most powerful rulers before he was awakened from centuries of slumber to the mystifying and dazzling world of Edwardian England. Having vanquished foes both human and supernatural, he's found love with the beautiful heiress Julie Stratford, daughter of Lawrence Stratford, the slain archeologist who discovered his tomb. Now, with the outbreak of a world war looming, Ramses and those immortals brought forth from the mists of history by his resurrection will face their greatest test yet.

Russian assassins bearing weapons of immense power have assembled under one command: all those who loved Lawrence Stratford must die. From the glowing jewels at their necks comes an incredible supernatural force: the power to bring statues to life. As Ramses and his allies, including the immortal queens Cleopatra and Bektaten, gather together to battle these threats, Ramses reveals that the great weapon may have roots in an ancient Egyptian ritual designed to render pharaohs humble before Osiris, the god of the underworld. The resulting journey will take them across storm-tossed seas and into the forests of northern Russia, where they will confront a terrifying collision of tortured political ambitions and religious fervor held in thrall to a Godlike power. But the true answers they seek will lie beyond the border between life and death, within realms that defy the imagination of even an immortal such as Ramses the Great.

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Religious Novels

I think, if one reads all of Anne Rice's work since Interview With the Vampire, one will find that a common theme in her books is spiritual journeys and souls tormented by questions of God and eternity. Even if the characters never appeal to God directly, they are still tormented by the same questions.

Lestat, as he moves us through his existence, is increasingly tormented by the question of salvation and even sainthood. He takes us through his first sexual experience in 200 years with Gretchen in The Tale of the Body Thief, then anguishes over his love for Rowan Mayfair (but cannot actually have sex with her) in Blood Canticle.

Rowan Mayfair, though she never puts her questions in the context of God, explores the same questions more philosophically. Like Lestat, she is concerned with morals - right and wrong, natural versus unnatural. Even Mona, the "wanderslut," acts upon her moral conviction when she first learns of her pregnancy by announcing the baby will be delivered and raised by Mona ("this is a Catholic family...we don't do away with babies" ~Taltos). Later, she carries her grudge against Rowan for the reason that she feels Rowan is directly responsible for taking a newborn - Mona's newborn - away from its mother.

Then there was Louis, who searched from the very beginning. In life, he had no answer for the loss of someone he loved (in the book, his brother; in the movie, his wife and child) so he wanted to end his life. When his life became a sort of living death, "undead," he had no choice but to search for meaning to his existence. Again, same questions, different framework.

Michael Curry, though he had separated from the Church (as had Rice at the time she wrote the Mayfair trilogy), still exhibited a desire to see, if not necessarily worship, at the altar of his childhood. Though his tour through St. Mary's is nostalgic more than anything else, he is still thrilled at the prospect of a traditional, beautiful white-dress wedding.

Granted, not all of Rice's characters are tormented souls, but the most famous of them certainly are. If Pandora and Vittorio were searching souls, I must have missed it, but they certainly had their anguish and their sense of what was good and right to them according to the time and culture their lives took place in. Can we say Azriel was not searching for some kind of meaning, or the man who talked with him, hearing the story of how Azriel became the Servant of the Bones? Was not Triana Becker in a similar torment (the most autobiographical fiction character Rice ever wrote about; I thought Violin was one of her best and most underrated novels)? Though her torment, on the surface, seemed to be about her compromised talent for playing the violin and her own confidence, what we see under the surface is extreme guilt and pain for the people she has lost.

Authors write about what they know, what interests them and what concerns them. When I sit down to write (not on this site), I write from those three elements. You could also say that writers also pursue what obsesses them. In that way, writing can be cathartic, but also can give us greater understanding as we see the things our minds have created spelled out before us. Getting it down on paper (or word processor) allows us breathing room; it allows us to explore different aspects of the story and it grows from there, becomes richer and the things we weren't aware of about ourselves and the world we live in become apparent.

It was apparent to me that Rice's most enduring characters endured because she put more into them than others. The specific "thing" she put into them was an ongoing spiritual torment that could not be resolved; there was no neat beginning, middle and happy ending. Indeed, characters struggled to establish a beginning in order to find a path through the middle they were muddling through to get to that elusive happy ending.

So it is with religious fiction. How is Toby O'Dare any different? Like Lestat, he started out wanting to be a priest, appreciate the arts, but became a killer because death visited him too early. Instead of a walking dead body, we have a walking dead soul. The parallels are in fact astonishing.

I don't think it was Rice's intention to reshape anything from the past to make it fit into her current context. It just happens that this is the major theme behind her life's work, and her life itself. This is what is the most apparent in her work because this is one of the most critical things to her as a person. I think fans appreciate that more than they will admit. It's easy to be scared off by the label "religious fiction" but this is hardly the first time in history that religious fiction has been written or published in any guise.

Rice's earlier work is often referred to as "gothic fiction." I think it would be very interesting to look at what is "gothic" and what is "religious."

If you look at the backside of the jacket to Angel Time, you see that what looks like clouds are in fact angels - millions upon billions upon trillions of angels, angels beyond count is what the picture implies. Some could be Roman, some Egyptian, some Chinese, some English, some South American, some Indian...or they could all just be. They could speak English, or Spanish, or French, or Africaans...or they could have a language all their own that no living person could ever learn. They could be black, brown, white, pink, blue, yellow...or they could be of indeterminate color. I'll bet they know a lot about Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Wicca, Shinto, atheism...

Can they fly, or do they use teleporters? The angels in the picture seem to all have wings but are those our own metaphor for how we perceive their ability to be mobile in the atmosphere? To us, the only things that fly in the air have wings. Naturally, we are going to assign these heavenly creatures an anatomy that requires wings for flight. Does that mean they could be part raptor without the talons?

There are so many questions and so many different answers that it's easy for it all to make your head dizzy.

It's okay to ask questions...that is why religious and gothic fiction both are so enduring.

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Autobiography

The fans of Anne Rice's earlier work seem to be a mixed bag as to how they react to her religious fiction and her spiritual memoir, Called Out of Darkness. Anne Rice herself had to defend her work quite a bit but I think she expected it, if I understand the back notes to Out of Egypt correctly.

The Parlor welcomes all spiritual and religious beliefs. We don't all have to have the same ones, but we can still all get along...

*NOTE ABOUT COVER ART: The covers shown do not always match the edition listed from which I used the summary.  The references are to the editions I used for the text only.  The book cover photos were chosen simply because they were either a. available or b. unique and beautiful.  The choice of different covers used throughout the site is meant to be a sort of "hidden" gallery of the cover art for Anne Rice's novels throughout their publishing history.

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Erotica

The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983) as A.N. Roquelaure
Beauty's Punishment (1984) as A.N. Roquelaure
Beauty's Release (1985) as A.N. Roquelaure
Beauty's Kingdom (2015) as A.N. Roquelaure
Exit to Eden (1985) as Anne Rampling
Belinda (1986) as Anne Rampling

Discretion advised: These novels are adult-oriented and are for mature readers. You can find out more about them on this page of the Parlor:

The Erotic Imagination of Anne Rice

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Audio Books

Please visit https://penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/ for abridged and unabridged audio books that have been approved by Anne Rice.  Some are available for download.

 

The Witching Hour, Lasher, Taltos, Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle are all available in abridged format.

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Films of Anne Rice's Books

Interview With the Vampire (1994) at imdb.com

Exit to Eden (1994) at imdb.com

The Feast of All Saints (2001) at imdb.com

Queen of the Damned (2002) at imdb.com

Interview With the Vampire (2022) on IMDb

For more on AMC's Interview With the Vampire series, click on the link to go to this page on The Parlor:

Lestat's Parlor

Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches (2023) on IMDb

For more on Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches on AMC, click on the link to go to this page on The Parlor:

Mayfair Witches From Page to Screen

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