Everyone who has fallen in love with the prose of Anne Rice has an origin story, according to her son, Christopher Rice. Usually, that origin story involves someone picking up “Interview with the Vampire” when they needed it most, he said.
Some of those stories were explored Monday night, along with the creation of “Interview with the Vampire,” during a 50th anniversary celebration of the book with authors Leigh Bardugo, Eric Shaw Quinn and Christopher Rice at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church.
The discussion, put on by Vroman’s Bookstore, was the culmination of events in the Los Angeles area honoring Rice and her work.
Christopher Rice and Quinn were on hand Friday, Oct. 2, as the Los Angeles City Council proclaimed Oct. 4 as Anne Rice Day in the city, which is also the late author’s birthday. And Rare Books LA held an event at Union Station on Saturday and Sunday featuring talks about the author’s influence and vampires in literature. Vampire-related memorabilia, including Anne Rice’s black wedding dress, was also on display during the book fair, which also hosted a blood drive.
Bardugo — the best-selling author of the Grishaverse and Alex Stern novels, who also penned the foreword in the new 50th anniversary edition of “Interview” — described herself as a “loud, awkward theater kid” who didn’t fit in when she bought the first few Vampire Chronicles books at 12 years old for a friend and ended up reading them all before gifting them.
“It wasn’t that I hadn’t read genre before; I had, but ‘Interview’ exists almost in its own genre. It feels so profoundly real,” she said Monday. “One of the things I talked about in my foreword, and I think is an experience … that a lot of us have, is that it doesn’t matter how many millions of copies you know this book has sold; it feels like you were the first person to read it.
It feels like Anne is whispering a secret in your ear — this passport to this other world and this other reality. And it felt so profoundly real to me. And then I went and read a lot of things I was probably too young to read,” she continued. “For me it was a shift in the way I thought about … my own life.”
Bardugo described the book as being about people seeking companionship and found family, but also the tragedy of being alone. Something that she felt as a teen growing up in the San Fernando Valley. Quinn, who was in his 30s when he read the book, had a similar experience of seeking companionship when he first picked up “Interview.”
“Anne Rice reached across time and space to me and said, ‘You’re already perfect the way you are,’”, Quinn said, describing how it felt like she was speaking to him through the pages. “You don’t have to pretend to fit into this shape.”
He noted that through his friendship with Anne Rice and her work, she convinced him to go “on the adventure of life,” moving away from things that made him unhappy and taught him to write the books he would want to read. Quinn called “Interview” a watershed event in literature and in the lives of so many people.
“This is the power of fantasy and genre. What you’ve been told is possible is only the beginning,” Bardugo said. “Everything in these books is a metaphor for what we experience in our own lives, and it cracks us open.”
Christopher Rice, who played the role primarily of moderator for the night, also told his share of stories about his mother, who passed away in Dec. 2021 in Rancho Mirage. Some of those stories included the reception of “Interview,” including a bad review by The New York Times that almost broke the author, the impact she had on Bardugo’s work, as well as the way Anne Rice was always unapologetically herself.
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