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Popular Culture Review
humbly offers Christ the Lord not only “to all Christians,” but “to all those who
have ever enjoyed or valued my earlier books,” but she cautions that Christians
and non-Christians must understand that this work is “fiction . . . fiction that
seeks to bring the reader closer to the Lord in whom my life belongs.” In fact,
writing about Christ for Rice “is my vocation; this is my life, this is the way in
which I hope to render unto God a series of books that honors Him as Our
Maker and as Our Savior. I am grateful to all of you who are willing to read
these books.” But, for those readers, the dichotomy between vampires and
Christ, the Son of God Himself, at first seems very sharp, alienating, and
perhaps even irreconcilable. The former creatures must repeatedly take human
life by sucking the blood of their victims in order to survive their immortal
existence and, thus, embody the most heinous of all worldly evils. The latter
entity, meanwhile, stands as nothing less than the Savior of mankind; the being
who sacrificed himself and died on the cross in order to atone for the Original
Sin of humanity and, by extension, the sins of all men. But both Rice’s vampires
and her Christ are also extreme examples of outsider figures, albeit for very
different reasons in each case. And the study that follows engages with the
notion that Rice’s (re-)tum to Christ in her most recent fiction can be understood
as an inevitable outgrowth of the spiritual, religious, philosophical, and
theological obsessions woven so deeply, intricately, and skillfully into the fabric
of the Chronicles o f the Vampires.
Christianity and The Vampire Chronicles
The initial premise Rice uses to open Interview with the Vampire, a novel
she describes in her recent memoir Called Out o f Darkness: A Spiritual
Confession as “an obvious lament for my lost faith” in God and His Son,
involves the accidental death of Louis de Point du Lac’s beloved younger
brother, who had become convinced that he was destined to be a an unparalleled
spiritual leader in the Catholic Church, and that he needed all of his family’s
considerable financial resources in order to fulfill this ordained mission (137).
On this point, Louis confides to his interviewer:
I loved my brother. . . and at