And she really does have the authority, doesn't she? When one stops to think about it, after she single-handedly provided the modern vampire fiction blueprint with the publication of Interview With the Vampire, it's almost unheard of to know that she's gotten little to no credit in the wake of the not-so-recent-anymore vampire craze that finally may be showing signs of stopping. Rice, in fact, has been quite vocal when it came to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, criticizing among other things the idea that Meyer's immortals inexplicably felt that it was necessary to attend ... high school. It's the stuff that's made Rice fans like myself furious in a way that one gets when they watch someone take credit they didn't deserve, especially when the real credit may go to a friend or a family member, or in our case, an author that you think of almost as family! It's like hearing someone claim to invent a brand when in all actuality, the brand exists because it's being targeted to a market that had no prior knowledge that the brand already existed! Vampires have become afterschool specials and we're all sick of it, and apparently, so is Anne Rice.
It's no wonder that she's given up on the genre for the time being and has instead moved on to werewolves with the February 2012 release of The Wolf Gift, a book that I guarantee will redefine the mythology. And I haven't even read it yet. I don't have to. That's just what she does. She turns legends inside out and fills in the holes that have existed for centuries. She did this reworking with vampires, witches, mummies, an ensemble of ghosts (most all of whom were from New Orleans, by the way), oh, and a marginal literary character by the name of Jesus Christ. And guess what? Anne Rice is about to do it again, readers, and no one has earned the authority to do so more than she has.
I've also seen recently that Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is being adapted into a film to be directed by Chris Columbus, and I may have this wrong, but it looks as though she may have some casting pull this time around. This, as some of you may remember, is a far cry from when Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat in the film version of Interview, a complaint that she later retracted, but one that I suspect kept her out of the creative meetings that resulted in the horrendous 2002 film adaptation of Queen of the Damned.
I certainly hope that this is the case, which would give Anne Rice the "author"-ity that she has deserved from Hollywood for well over thirty years now, taking her place as the reason why vampires are still around to make sparkly and send to proms.
