Anne Rice

Anne Rice became famous for her bestselling “Vampire Chronicles,” which began with the 1976 bestseller Interview with the Vampire.

Her new novel is The Wolf Gift, her first book featuring a werewolf.

From the author's Q & A with Alexandra Alter for the Speakeasy blog:

What appealed to you about the werewolf myth?

What I always do is write from the point of view of the monster or the supernatural character, whether it’s Jesus or a vampire or whatever. Of course, what I’ve found disappointing in werewolf literature is that werewolves often don’t remember becoming werewolves. The classic Lon Chaney movie [the 1941 film “The Wolf Man”] shows him waking up with no memory of turning into a ferocious man wolf and no memory of participation of it. That story almost always ends with the silver bullet. There’s nothing for him to do but die. As a werewolf, he’s just a rabid monster. I thought, “What if I have a hero who’s completely conscious during the transformation?”

Werewolves have been pretty popular lately—were you worried that werewolf bubble might be about to burst?

I was warned. People said, “How can you write about this? Look at the field. It’s too crowded.” Well, what does that mean to me? When I wrote “Interview with the Vampire” in 1973, vampires were a late-night horror movie, comic-book subject. People said, that’s crazy to write a book in which everybody’s a vampire. Nobody’s going to read that. Yes, there are a lot of werewolves out there running around in “True Blood” and “Twilight,” and there always have been. But...[read on]

Learn what Anne Rice thinks about Twilight and True Blood.

--Marshal Zeringue