Turns out Anne Rice has been experiencing a few problems with real-life vampires. Having made a fortune off the old Catholic folk legend…
[bear with me while I pause this sentence for a few writerly gripes:
[I was a tad pissed when Interview With the Vampire came out, since I’d been vaguely thinking about writing something similar, but — I hate truth when it applies to myself — she did it better than I would have…
[well, at least she did with that first book…
[the grudging tone being exactly what I mean about too much truth… ]
… okay, griping done. So having made a fortune and bought lots of houses and all that, Rice very publicly “became a Christian,” or rather, took up the Catholicism she’d abandoned in her teens. The Mel-Gibson-defending kind of Catholicism (as in brave-hearted, misunderstood Mel). Now, ten years later, after some truly awful Christ-y books and having retreated from New Orleans to an air-conditioned Palm Springs life surrounded by glassy-eyed dolls (this Daily Telegraph piece was kind) and presumably influenced by the bad publicity created by priestly pederasty, she’s discovered — pow! — that she has a conscience, and has handed in her Church membership card.
Ever a woman of the times, she didn’t retreat in silence, or write to the Pope. Instead, she quit on Facebook, which was reported by Gawker, and is being re-reported, re-tweeted, re-posted etc as I write.
It took her two tries to do it (that’s the trouble with being a writer — you’re always revising). Here’s the first go:
and here’s the second:
Only one thing to say here, and appropriately it’s a play on a line from The Fearless Vampire Killers: “Oy, lady, do you have the wrong Christians…”
(f you missed out on the Polanski movie, a Jewish vampire, faced with a luscious shiksa holding up a cross to ward him off, says “Oy lady, do you have the wrong vampire…”)
Rice evidently expects kudos and warm-hearted acceptance back into the agnostic fold, but I’m not buying. The real question is this: Couldn’t she have chosen better Christians in the first place? Has she never heard of liberation theology? (rhetorical question — evidently not). And since when are all Christians right-wing fundamentalist bigots?
True, those bigots have tried their best to lay sole claim to the title of Christian — they’d register Jesus as a trademark if they could. But even someone as averse as I am to organized religion can see that there’s plenty of Christians out there who don’t go round loudly proclaiming their Christianity or wearing what-would-Jesus-do bracelets or bowing to the Pope no matter what new idiocy emerges from the Vatican. These are the Christians who actually do spend their lives acting in the spirit of Jesus instead of the letter of some pastoral or papal law.
But of course Rice could only have chosen one of the most closed-minded forms of Christianity. The metaphor is just too juicy to resist, because the fundamentalist churches are her bread and butter — vampires for Christ, sucking the life out of body, mind, and soul.
