Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, ideal-promoting gothic tales, which includes Job interview With The Vampire, reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She was 80.

Rice died late Saturday (Dec 11) thanks to problems from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice announced on her Fb webpage and his Twitter website page.

“As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions,” Christopher Rice, also an writer, wrote. “In her ultimate several hours, I sat beside her hospital mattress in awe of her accomplishments and her bravery.”

Rice’s 1976 novel Job interview With The Vampire was later on tailored, with a script by Rice, into the 1994 film directed by Neil Jordan and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. It truly is also set to be adapted all over again in an future Television set collection on AMC and AMC+ set to premiere up coming yr.

Interview With The Vampire, in which reporter Daniel Molloy interviews Louis de Pointe du Lac, was Rice’s first novel but above the up coming five decades, she would compose extra than 30 guides and provide more than 150 million copies worldwide. Thirteen of individuals were section of the Vampire Chronicles begun with her 1976 debut. Lengthy in advance of Twilight or True Blood, Rice introduced sumptuous romance, female sexuality and queerness – many took Interview With The Vampire as an allegory for homosexuality – to the supernatural genre.

“I wrote novels about people who are shut out of existence for numerous good reasons,” Rice wrote in her 2008 memoir Named Out Of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. “This turned a terrific concept of my novels – how one suffers as an outcast, how just one is shut out of various degrees of which means and, in the end, out of human existence itself.”

Born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941, she was raised in New Orleans, in which many of her novels had been set. Her father worked for the postal assistance but designed sculptures and wrote fiction on the aspect. Her older sister, Alice Borchardt, also wrote fantasy and horror fiction. Rice’s mom died when Rice was 15. 

Elevated in an Irish Catholic spouse and children, Rice initially imagined herself becoming a priest (right before she realised females weren’t permitted) or a nun. Rice generally wrote…