Though there are reflections of the author in various distorted mirrors here and there, as with all novelists, it's a mistake to read Rice's work as autobiography. Not since Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' and Louisa May Alcott's penny dreadful novelettes has a woman written so strongly about death and sex. To Rice, catharsis is turning tragedy into art, 'redeeming sorrow by writing,' as she says, adding: 'It seems like a dream now that the child existed and perished.' From 'The Queen of the Damned,' by Anne Rice (Knopf), as are all subsequent italic quotations That's it, dear, you must drink it to get well. And I had kissed them both, the Sleeping Beauties! Claudia, Claudia, come round now, Claudia.

I saw the black-eyed Queen motionless on her throne. I saw the little mortal child, lying there in the soiled covers smell of sickness. Claudia who sank her knife into my heart and twisted it, and watched as the blood poured down my shirt. A face for a locket or a small oval portrait done on porcelain and kept with a curl of her golden hair in a drawer. In it, Claudia, now a little girl vampire/ghost, is eulogized again.Ĭlaudia. Last Sunday - only coincidentally the day before Halloween - 'The Queen of the Damned,' the third book in Rice's vampire history of the world, topped the bestseller lists a week after its debut. The book pierced and possessed those who by choice or rejection stand apart from society - heretics, moon worshipers, gays and lovers of the night, the supernatural, the erotic and the exotic - and all those who like to travel in imaginary universes, where nothing is as it seems. And it infected a whole cult of followers.

The book was acclaimed by critics, some of whom called it the most voluptuous and seductive erotic horror story of our times. That was when Rice began writing 'Interview With the Vampire.' Claudia, an eternal child with a history of passion, is one of the vampires. 'It was the most clear example of a prophetic dream I've ever heard of,' Rice says, and shudders. She died just before her sixth birthday, in 1972. Michelle lived two years, a long time for a small girl whose white blood cells were eating up the red. Not long after, when Michelle Rice was 4, Rice learned that the child was indeed ill, with a curious, adult form of leukemia. 'I had a prophetic dream of my daughter dying of something wrong with her blood. 'I've never seen a ghost, but I have had two or three extraordinary - dreams,' says Anne Rice.

The Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice