Anne Rice;

No blog page talking about Fantasy books and more specifically which speaks of The Vampire Genre would be complete with out talking about The Woman who reintroduced us to Vampires, and made us fall helplessly In Love with them all over again! I am speaking of course about none other than that brilliant and timelessly classic author Anne Rice! She has brought us, and continues to bring us so many wonderful books! However it was her Vampire series that really put her on the map, and in a way recreated, or reinvented the entire Vampire genre, and brought it back out of the horror movie era, into its true historical virtue and characterizations!

It all began with The Book that inspired a film classic; Interview with the Vampire! With the writing of this book she changed the Vampire Genre forever, and we are so thankful that she did!

She began writing the book as a way to deal with the doubts, and the loss of faith she felt after loosing one of her children; her daughter! It was a creative, and a courageous act to take that grief, and pain; go exploring internally and turn all of into a work of pure majesty and dark beauty! She went on to write many other things, she wrote some terrific erotica under another pen name A. N. Roquelaure. She has also gone on to write a terrific series based on the Life of Christ, after finding her faith again! More recently she has written a new wolf book that I can not wait to read!

I follow her on face book, and have watched several videos of her speaking about different things. I am often amazed at her brilliance and her most interesting insights into life! She has inspired me personally by taking up the cause of equal, fair, and compassionate treatment for Gay People! She said once that she quit being a Christian! She still loves, worships, and follows God and the teaching of Jesus Christ but has stopped being involved with organized religion! It was a bold move to make these sentiments public, some say it was even misguided! I really don’t know how I feel as a gay christian, except to say that I am so grateful to her for her absolute beauty as a human being and an artist!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Wb5CnYrmA

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She would probably not welcome the comparison, so I will try to word my next thoughts carefully. It was Anne Rice who brought vampires out of the coffin and into our lives once again. Until recently the entire vampire genre has been based on inspiration from her work! So much so, that in a way the vampire genre seemed frozen and almost in a kind of stasis to me! I mean how do you improve on Anne Rice’s vampires? The easy answer is you don’t! Not with the type of vampire she wrote about! What was needed was a reinvention of what vampires were altogether; what they looked like, what their lives were like, how they lived! Several series in the past few years have done this beautifully! It was Stephenie Meyers though who wrote the series that would best reinvent the pop vampire for an entire global generation! I am not comparing the books or even the authors themselves! They are worlds apart in some ways and those differences are beautiful and amazing on both sides of the divide! But both deal with some similar issues, such as soulful vampires who seek to be loved just as much as we do! Both series also take a different approach to the same subject; that of the pop culture vampire! Films like Interview with a Vampire, and Bram Stokers Dracula fit the era in which they were released better than anything could have at the time, for the Fantasy Romance Vampire genre! Now The Twilight book and film series has done the same thing for the current era! Both of these authors have reached a global audience and made us love their work!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110148/

This Film; Queen of the Damned was not so much based on Anne’s book to me, but rather, it was inspired by her work.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238546/





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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103874/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1099212/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2T7d8j6I5I



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http://www.annerice.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Rice

http://www.facebook.com/annericefanpage

http://www.annerice.com/Bookshelf-VampireChronicles.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Beauty_Trilogy

http://www.annerice.com/christthelord-outofegypt-editions.html

http://annerice.com/Bookshelf-Interview.html

http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Gift-Anne-Rice/dp/0307595110/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319547641&sr=1-3

http://www.christopherricebooks.com/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christopher-Rice/64111603598


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There have been many wonderful vampire series that I have loved. Including television shows, books, and movies! I will write about some of them later but I did just want to mention them here! Listed in no particular order;

Lost Boys

Dark Shadows

Underworld

The Sookie Stackhouse; southern vampire mysteries and the television show based on it True Blood!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844441/
http://www.charlaineharris.com/


The vampire diaries book and television series; (the books started out great, than after a while they got a little silly; I later found out they fired the author from writing her own series and continued with another author which I find outrageous and wrong! So as much as I loved the first books, the television show has already surpassed their greatness)!


The Lair (as well as it’s counter part about witches - Dante’s Cove)

The House of Night series (had a great promising beginning, and a terrific premise, but it lost my interest at book six, the films promise to be good though so I guess we will see)!

The Vampire Academy series

the brotherhood
http://www.obscurehorror.com/brotherhood.html

Vampire Boys

The Forsaken

Salem’s Lot

Fright night

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Dark Beauty, Dark Gifts, Dark Truths, sometimes any of these or all of these can bring us into the search for The Light of Love

I will leave this blog post by letting Anne's vampire chronicles characters have the last impact; So here are pictures of various scenes from the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire;