Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice; Revised Edition - Softcover

Given the macabre and often lurid subject matter of Anne Rice's fiction, one would imagine that a good biography of her would uncover some pretty spicy details, and, in fact, Katherine Ramsland's Prism of the Night does a pretty good job of balancing analysis of Rice's work with a probing and revealing investigation of her life. Ramsland, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, extensively interviewed Rice for the book, and Stan Rice (Anne's poet-husband) read the manuscript. Throughout, Ramsland fulfills the promise of her introduction: "My approach combines psychological interpretation with philosophical themes. As I read the novels, I looked for qualities that transcended genre, while also developing autobiographical sketches.... This book is the result of an involved and sincere attempt to trace in her writing elements of literary creativity manifested in psychological sources." Often, close readings of the fiction are coupled with commentary about the key events (emotional, personal, literary, etc.) in Rice's life that likely impacted her characters and plots. The section on the death of Rice's daughter as it manifests in Interview with the Vampire is especially wrenching. The book will be appreciated by fans for its extensive direct citation of Rice and her closest friends and relatives, and for its diverse collection of photographs. --Patrick O'Kelley

Exciting life of bestselling gothicist Anne Rice, by psychologist/philosopher Ramsland (Philosophy/Rutgers). Benefiting from Rice's input, this will have to be thought of as an ``authorized'' biography, although Ramsland is her own writer--and at times a heavy-going writer, bearing what might be called the Curse of the Jungians, an overdense working out of Rice's sea-changes and gender shiftings. Born in New Orleans and named Howard Allen, Rice has always been an outsider with strong male traits and since childhood has refused to accept victimization by dress and gender codes. Like Orson Welles, she and her three sisters were raised from infancy to be geniuses, allowed to stay up late, dabble at will and read what they wished, and skip school, all with the doting permission of their alcoholic mother, Katherine, and highly moral Catholic father, Howard. Katherine's death at 48 was the deepest blow Rice had ever experienced (alcoholism claimed many family members at that very age and might have claimed Rice as well had she and her brilliant poet-husband Stan Rice not agreed in 1979 to total abstinence)--and was followed by her daughter Michele's death from leukemia at age five. These events fed in a disguised fashion into her first successful novel, Interview with the Vampire, and into her following vampire novels, which, Ramsland shows, granted immortality to her dead mother and daughter--until Rice killed them off and arose psychically refreshed. Despite success, she writes as she wishes: Later novels were audience-losers, as were pseudonymous porno novels, until she returned to her vampire chronicles. Ramsland's study climaxes in the middle--with the deeply moving death of Michele as recaptured by Stan's electric elegy--and her later knifework on the Rice psyche and its fictions gets tiresome. Still, the book is mostly quite gripping, and deserves to hit big and probably will. (Sixteen pages of b&w photograph--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.