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NEW RELEASE
Gothic Author Anne Rice Turns
Her Attention to Jesus Christ in New Novel
Michael Ireland
Assist News Service
CBN.com –
LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA (ANS) -- According to secular news
sources Gothic mystery writer Anne Rice has turned to Christ and
will now only write "for the Lord."
An article by David Gates, Senior Writer, to be published in
the Newsweek Oct. 31, 2005 issue, says that many of Rice's
fans have been worried about her.
After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 65, hasn't published a book
since 2003's Blood Chronicle, the tenth volume of her
best-selling vampire series.
Gates says her readers may have heard she came close to death
last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and
also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma;
that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which
she'd left at age 18.
"They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years,
died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their
longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane
Katrina, she still has property there -- and the deep emotional
connection that led her to make the city the setting for such
novels as Interview With the Vampire."
Gates asks: " What's up with her? "
"For the last six months," she says, "people have
been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've
told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'."
In two weeks, says Gates, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires,
witches and -- under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure -- of soft-core
S&M encounters, will publish Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt,
a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself.
"I promised," she says, "that from now on I would
write only for the Lord."
Gates says it's the most startling public turnaround since Bob
Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been
born again.
Gates writes: "Rice knows Out of Egypt and its
projected sequels -- three, she thinks -- could alienate her following.
As Rice writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence
to my career."
Gates says she sees a continuity with her old books, "whose
compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual
unease," he writes.
"I mean, I was in despair," Rice told Gates.
In the afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural
hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."
In order to render such a hero and his world believable, Gates
says Rice "immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in
first-century histories and New Testament scholarship -- some
of which she found disturbingly skeptical."
Gates says she also watched every Biblical movie she could find,
from The Robe to The Passion of the Christ ("I
loved it"). She also dipped into previous novels, from Quo
Vadis to Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the
Son to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left
Behind series.
Rice says she can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ
a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the
son of Joseph by a previous marriage, Gate explains.
He also writes that Rice has also taken liberties where they
don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. For example, no one
reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo
of Alexandria, as the novel has it -- or that Jesus' family was
in Alexandria at all. Rice has also used legends of the boy Messiah's
miracles from the non-canonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds
to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.
"Rice's most daring move, though," says Gates, "is
to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently
aware that he's also God Almighty."
"There were times when I thought I couldn't do it,"
she admits.
According to Gates, the advance notices say she's pulled it off.
The Kirkus Reviews pronounces her Jesus "fully believable."
However, Gates says it's hard to imagine all readers will be
convinced when Jesus delivers such lines as "And there came
in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!"
He says this attempt to render a child's point of view "can
read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway."
He cites the line: "It was time for the blessing. The first
prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a
little different to me. But it was still very good."
Gates says the novel's best scene is a dream in which Jesus meets
a bewitchingly handsome Satan: "smiling, then weeping, then
raging."
He says "Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue
Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow."
Rice already has much of the next volume written. But she says
she has been advised not to talk about it.
"If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want
to do it," she told Gates, "then I might go on and write
a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in
a world that includes redemption."
(Read the article in Newsweek)
Rice's Latest Novel: Interview with a Messiah
Dave Goldiner, in an article originally published in the October
24, 2005 New York Daily News, says: "Anne Rice has
found God -- and her legion of devoted fans will have to get used
to life without her blood-soaked vampire novels."
Goldiner says the best-selling queen of Gothic fiction told Newsweek
her upcoming book, and all future works, will be written in the
voice of Jesus Christ.
Rice has sold 136 million copies of her 25 books. Her long-awaited
book is titled Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt about the
7-year-old Jesus, is narrated by Christ himself.
Goldiner says Rice, 65, returned to the Catholic Church after
a life-threatening medical scare and now plans to write three
sequels about the life of Christ.
"She knows it might not go over big with fans who ate up
her chronicles of witches, warlocks, and soft-core S&M encounters,"
says Goldiner.
He says Rice insists the gore-soaked evildoers that populate
her previous novels like Interview with a Vampire only
reflected her own longstanding spiritual unease. "I mean,
I was in despair," she says.
"In the end, she predicts readers may find more of what
they are looking for in Jesus than Dracula," Goldiner writes.
Goldiner says: "Christ is 'the ultimate supernatural hero,'
(Rice) writes in the new book's afterword. "The ultimate
immortal of them all."
Kim Covert, writing for The Canadian Press, says Rice,
"built her reputation writing books about vampires and witches,
exploring her own faith as her characters wrestled with timeless
themes of good and evil.
"Now Anne Rice has taken on the story of Christ himself."
Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is a novel written as
a first-person account by Jesus of his very early years.
Covert says that in the book's afterword Rice details her research
"-- the years she spent studying Christ and his times, delving
deeply into academic treatises. So the book should have been a
fascinating fictional distillation of all that she learned. Unfortunately,
what she has written is worthy of a Sunday-school Life of Jesus.
"
Covert writes that Rice starts from a position of absolute faith
in the divinity of Jesus. The first thing the small boy in the
book does is bring a playmate, whom he'd accidentally killed,
back to life.
"In what is apparently the first in a planned series of
books Rice addresses none of the scholarly doubt that she must
have come across in the course of her study," Covert says.
"Her first-person technique is also problematic, given the
age of Jesus at the beginning. What are obviously the remembrances
of a grown man are told in the at-times authentic language of
a preschooler."
Covert says that Rice attempts to capture the cadences of the
verses of the Bible, using commas and "and" a lot: "Meanwhile
the Romans tried everywhere in Judea to put down the rebellion,
and they still had the Arabs marching with them, and the Arabs
burned Judean villages. And the whole family of King Herod was
still in Rome fighting and disputing before Augustus, as to who
should be King."
She says: "This might have been an interesting device if
it had been used through the whole book, but she fails to maintain
the rhythm."
Covert explains that what Rice does do well in Christ the
Lord is describe Jesus' world, the division of labor -- and
impossibility of privacy -- within the extended families, the
roles of women and men, of church and state,.
According to The Associated Press (AP), Rice, who developed a
cult following with her novels of witches and vampires, "warns
her fans they may not want to follow her into the light of her
new subject -- Jesus Christ."
An online report states: "Her latest novel, Christ the
Lord: Out of Egypt, is narrated by Christ himself as a seven-year-old
boy. The bestselling author of 26 books is already planning three
sequels for her new character, although she said they may not
be well received by her dedicated fans."
The United Press International (UPI) newswire service, says:
"Gothic fiction writer Anne Rice, known for her steamy, blood-soaked
vampire tales, says her books from now on will reflect her renewed
faith in God."
UPI says: "Although she will most likely lose some readers
with her new direction, others may find Jesus satisfies their
spiritual needs better than the vampire Lestat, she said."
Of Rice's new work, Kirkus Reviews, says: "A riveting,
reverent imagining of the hidden years of the child Jesus. "
"Attacked by a vicious bully, seven-year-old Yeshua employs
uncanny powers to drop his assailant onto the sand and then to
bring him back to life," the review says.
The reviewer says: "It's the remarkable beginning of the
26th novel by an author whose pulpy vampire chronicles (Blood
Canticle, 2003, etc.) hardly prepare us for a book so spiritually
potent as this."
It continues: "Following Jesus and his family's journey
from Egyptian exile to their ancestral home, it recasts Bible
stories (the Magi's visit, the presentation at the temple) in
the detailed context of Jewish rebellion against Herod Archelaus,
the impious ruler of Israel.
"A cross between a historical novel and an update of Tolstoy's
The Gospels in Brief, it presents Jesus as nature mystic,
healer, prophet and very much a real young boy.
"Essentially, it's a mystery story, of the child grappling
to understand his miraculous gifts and numinous birth. He animates
clay pigeons, causes snowfall and dazzles his elders with unheard-of
knowledge."
Kirkus Reviews says: "Rice's book is a triumph
of tone -- her prose lean, lyrical, vivid -- and character: As
he ponders his staggering responsibility, the boy is fully believable
-- and yet there's something in his supernatural empathy and blazing
intelligence that conveys the wondrousness of a boy like no other."
It adds: "Rice's concluding Author's Note traces the book's
genesis to her return to Catholicism in 1993, her voracious reading
-- a mountain of New Testament scholarship, the Apochrya, the
ancient texts of Philo and Jospephus -- and her passionate search
for the Jesus of the Gospels.
Concluding with the comment that, "With this novel, she
has indeed found a convincing version of him; this is fiction
that transcends story and instead qualifies as an act of faith,"
Kirkus says: "Joins Nikos Kazantzakis's The
Last Temptation of Christ and Shusaku Endo's A Life of
Jesus as one of the bolder re-tellings."
Michael Ireland is an international British freelance journalist.
A former reporter with a London newspaper, Michael is the Chief
Correspondent for ASSIST News Service of Garden Grove, California.
This report was compiled from online reviews previously appearing
on the World Wide Web.
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