Quitting Christianity - Anne Rice

My vampire theater mask tattoo. Got it in 1999.

I am an Anne Rice acolyte.  This means that not only have I read every single one of her books, I have read the majority of them several times.  I went to New Orleans in 2001 not to hear great music or eat amazing food.  I got on a plane and flew there with one goal:  to stand in front of 1239 First Street.  Anne's home.  The house in the Mayfair witches series.  I have an Anne Rice tattoo.

Her books to me, at least her Vampire Chronicles, were always more than blood sucking monsters who in their androgyny defied social rules and cadence.  To me, they were the epitome of the outsider looking in, yearning to be accepted and to find that enduring love.  They were in search of truth and God.  They were all parts of myself and during the first year that I discovered Lestat and Louis and Marius, I understood what it meant to uncover parts of yourself that you never knew were there.  I wasn't just a reader of her books, I was in every sense of the word obsessed with these characters and Anne herself.

I couldn't read enough.  It was like every book peeled back another layer of me.  It was as though she peered into my soul and wrote what she found there.  I had never and still have never found a writer that did this for me.  Because of this, Anne Rice has always been more like a friend I never met.  That sounds really odd doesn't it?  I'm not a fan mail person.  I'm not really a huge fan of anyone to be honest.  After the Motley Crue obsession died down in the late 80's early 90's, I left that sort of devotion to my teen years.  And then, I saw the movie.  Interview with a Vampire.  I watched it one Saturday afternoon on VHS and got into my car and went to the bookstore.  I bought Interview, The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned.  And I read and read and read.  Literally reading the last page only to pick up the next without skipping a beat.  And when I had read all three, I started over from the beginning again.  I marked off the next release dates on my calendar, I stood in line for my pre-purchased copy of Tale of the Body Theif, Memnoch the Devil and so on and on and on.

During this time, the internet was still new.  Not so new that I didn't find Anne Rice fan pages and listservs though.  I taught myself html and quickly got myself a geocities website.  For months I tweaked code and built one of the largest Anne Rice fan sites going.  I had hundreds and hundreds of hits every day and for 1997 that was a lot.  I had AOL dial-up and updating my site would take a half hour or more.  I was a total dork for this world.


A fellow fan asked about the Witching Hour and through that I found the Mayfairs.  And then Ramses the Damned, The Beauty Series, Cry to Heaven and so many others.  Cry to Heaven remains to this day the best book I have ever read in my life.  Ever.  I have read it so many times that I wore out my paperback twice.

So, yes.  I know Anne Rice's story.  When she announced ten years ago that she was leaving the vampires and witches and became a born-again Catholic I thought, "Really?"  Her husband Stan had passed (a bit of trivia - Lestat's name was supposed to be Lestan after her husband.  The "t" was a typo and she liked it so much she kept it.) away and I thought that perhaps that was what she needed to get through.  The Chronicles were becoming tired anyhow and a few of the books were just really not as good as the others.  In fact there is one I have a hard time believing she even wrote (I wasn't a fan of Violin either).  But, as I was saying, I was surprised by her return to the church.  Her son is gay and it just seemed to be sort of, well, wrong.

Recently Anne announced that she was leaving Christianity.  That she was still devoted to Christ but could no longer be a part of the organized religion that came out so strongly against gay marriage, women's rights, and so on.  She wrote that she felt Christians ruined Christianity.  In fact, here it is:

"For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten ...years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."

And I thought, yeah.  That's it exactly!  This... this is how I feel.  Christianity has nothing to do anymore with being Christian.  Isn't that sad?  Organized religion has brought war and death and sin and greed and abuse.  The people running the church have devastated it.

And so, once again, my love of all things Anne have come back to the forefront.  She was on NPR tonight and she was fantastic:

 I, too, wonder what this will mean for her writing.  I wasn't in love with her latest novel and the character of Toby O'Dare.  But you know, her true fans will give it time.  Anne's writing style is slow.  Its truly a gothic style of writing where a description of a room can take a few paragraphs.  Her books are tiramisu compared to Stephanie Meyers' gobstopper fluff.  Now, there is room for both and I actually got a kick out of Twilight... I'm just comparing the two for some reason.  The only thing in common here is that both write (or wrote) about vampires.  

I am interested in reading the book she is currently writing.  I am re-reading some old favorites.  I am enjoying the resurrection of Anne Rice and hope a new generation will put down their glittery vamps for a while and take a look at the dark, painful and beautiful world she created.