Anne Rice, Catholic Author

Via The Japery ... Back in 1998, Anne Rice, author of the vampire series of novels including Interview With A Vampire, relapsed into the Roman Catholicsm she'd recovered from at 18. (Yours truly suffered the same relapse in his late twenties, very early thirties, a condition which continues to this day...) Now, according to Newsweek:

In two weeks, 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." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.

I read five or ten of Rice's books (vampires and Mayfair witches) during my freshman and sophomore years in college. Partly it felt like a guilty pleasure, but I also always had the sense that the lush and purple prose transcended somewhat the standard gothic romance and was sometimes genuinely beautiful. Looking at it now through the filter of this news story, I can't help but wonder if there was something of "smells and bells" in the writing. I'm still trying to figure out by what I mean by that (maybe that the intense understanding of the merging of physicality and spirit in the texture of the Church's liturgy -- incense, vestments, stained glass, candles, and bells! -- and the texture of Rice's prose have a sort of parallel?) , but in the meantime, I know for sure I'm quite curious to read this new book.

More good discussion of this over at Open Book.