The Queen of Horror Rises! Anne and Chris Rice

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It's the Corell Cast.

Listen daily on your favorite streaming service. It is the Cralcast. I am Carell.

Happy New Year's Eve, So very glad you are joining me now. As you all know, it's the last day of twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five. It's already twenty twenty five in Australia in places like that, it's just around the corner for us, and I hope we're going to try to make it a good one. I've been so grateful for you in twenty twenty four. I love

All the books, just all the books.

She I had met in New Orleans years New Orleans years earlier, she remembered me. Of course we became friends afterwards. I'm still friends with Chris. Writing and literature is so important, and if you don't want to spend time reading, do an audiobook. But it's important that we continue to revere and respect and be interested in authors and people who write. And I certainly was inted in Anne Rice. I wish she could have lived to see the success of her

All over the world.

The names on these headstones around this cemetery are the names on the streets all over Long Beach. The founders of my city reside here. This is where the original Long Beachians live. I come to this cemetery a lot to think, to contemplate, and I wonder why people are of the dead and cemeteries make them all creepy and creep them out.

Let's be real.

As humans, we have a preoccupation with what comes next, and writers for years and years and years.

Have been fantasizing about it. Now.

One of my favorite someone whose books I have read in this very cemetery, maybe right here by Miss may Davis. Honey Sarahlida may Davis is Anne Rice, and I met her son many years ago, about ten now, who when he came out as a gay person. I first interviewed her in Arlands. Now Irelands as they call it now Arlands with my late husband Andrew Howard on a trip going through there. And I've interviewed her many times throughout the year.

Now.

She writes about vampires and ghosts and goblins and you know, mummies and things that come up and come out of the ground. Trust me, I've been here many a night. Nothing really has come out of the ground around here now. If you know Anne Rice, and you know the Vampire Chronicles, which is not her new book, by the way, her new book. Her new book is about Ramses and Cleopatra Ramses, of course another character she has created, the Mummy, But

I never do know.

One thing I do know is Anne Rice is a delight. Her son is a joy. And we got to sit down with them in their West Hollywood apartment, in his West Hollywood apartment and live somelve But she was visiting for the book tour and have tea in one of her favorite and not my favorite chee scents.

Shain say.

In the year two thousand, two thousand and one, so this would be sixteen seventeen years ago. We were on the ten Freeway, my late husband and I on our way to KFI Radio, and I said, do you know this freeway touches so many cities and states across the country. It goes from the Santa Monica Pier to Jacksonville, Florida. Wouldn't it be great to broadcast all across the way, never going more than ten miles north or south of it. Well we did, and what an adventure. That's we're making that.

I opened it up.

A wonderful person answered the phone. I said, I am a radio host. I am from Los Angeles. I have a major show that I'm traveling with. I would love to interview Miss.

Rice the next day. The very next day, we arrive at her door.

Me carrying the only store bought version of Queen of the Dan that I could get, which was a paperback, And you answer, Lestatt, Louis and Claudia dolls are right by the front door.

I'll never forget it. We go in and do the interview. You were upstairs, you were nineteen years old. Who knows, I say, And I don't want to know what you were doing up there.

No, And all this artwork around us is by your late husband Stan, he was there painting. You gave us a grand tour, You showed us where Lasher was born, and you dissed all this wonderful stuff. And I just never forgot the generosity of spirit and sharing of the time and meeting Anne Rice, which was pretty freaking cool. So it's even more cool now to be sitting in her son's apartment in West Hollywood, her openly gay son, by the way, which I think is pretty.

Cool, open open as.

I was.

Successfully.

Yes, we got the toaster oven, so it's a really great thing. It's sort of like a coming full circle for me, at least in terms of interviews. I'm here because they have a new book that's out and I really want to talk about that so much so that I dressed for it.

Uh.

And I also want to talk about just life as the rices these days. First of all, thank you all, and thank you for inviting me up to the house.

It's very nice.

They did a six hour gab fest yesterday.

Uh.

And we're the last thing they're doing, and we thank them for that. You know, I sent you the itinerary that we're going to talk about, but I want to jump around because I do want to start with the new book. On the way up here, I had a friend of mine try to google how many mothers son.

Writing teams there are.

It was very hard to find a lot of resources on that. There's not a lot of mother son or father's son. Stephen King just did one with his son, Yeah, with Owen, but there's not a lot of collaborations with family, So you two are sort of unique in that. And I wanted to ask because a lot of celebrity kids try to either run from their parents or run from

Who asked who to collaborate? How did that? Did you ask him or did he say to you this would be a good idea. How did that happen?

I asked him. I don't think Christopher would have ever come to me and said, can I collaborate with you on one of your series? Wanted to know he wouldn't have done that, but I asked him.

Oh, I don't know.

It's kind of presumptuous, you know, and I think it's propriety.

Well, yeah, it's a little.

It's a little presumptuous, you know. I think also what we were looking at, too, is that my books are very different from hers, so if it was going to be a combination, it needed to be the right formula for the right project and this book, you know. Really to answer the question of how we came to collaborate working together on various Hollywood projects, specifically adaptations of her books, is how this became to seem less like an extraordinary or out of the Pales thing.

It's sort of like the the and it's the Vampire Chronics.

Are we allowed to YEA yeah, if the Vampire Chronicle, if they're being made for television, finally, I hope that you'll be happy with them.

I had interviewed executive producer.

I'm an executive producer. Chris is an executive producer, and he's writing the scripts. So we are collaborating on that.

In so far as I read this, you've trusted your other children to your chitle.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

But I mean even before that, we were working on a movie version that didn't work out, thank god, because it wasn't ultimately what we wanted to do with the project, but we were working to make it the best and Rice adaptation that it could be. So it paved the way for us to work together on a book because I think at the stake are higher for Hollywood adaptations in collaboration because there's so many other people you have to collaborate, right, whereas with the book, it's the editor and talk.

About high stakes.

In reading about this new book coming out, the fans were clamoring they wanted more of Ramsey.

And eighty nine.

I believe it was when I read that book, or was it it was eighty nine eighty nine when I read that. I still don't understand the whole beef with Cleopatra.

Will get into that, but I read the sequel. Yeah right, yeah, I gotta get to the thing. I got my hands on that Thinguel. What took Was it just life or was it not his time?

A number of things happened. I mean, there was a lot of commotion at that time. My father died at that time, right at the time when Ramses was on the best seller list and I was working on the Vampire Chronicles. The Queen of the Damned was my first New York Times number one best seller, and that changed our lives just really.

Queen of the dam was the first one of the Chronicles to be number one.

Best thing it was, it was, and that was an amazing experience.

It's an amazing book.

And within a few years the movie was made, you know, and that made that I always have to take some time out after a movie. I've to absorb that, you know. So all of those different things happened. James Cameron had bought the rights really, you know, through a studio to the first Ramsay's book, and he was going to make a movie out of it. We'd talked on the phone,

Very for us because we're here. This is typical Hollywood. This is how projects get shuffled and then.

Get made Sure.

Took them thirty years to make Antelope, to have things fall into place to where she could actually get.

To that's really, that's really it. I mean, I was free to write it in anytime, always keep the literary rights on anything. But all that was going on in my mind, and then I reread the book and I found I wanted to do something new, So I did the Wolf Gift books. But I thought, maybe if I invite Christopher in on this and he wants to do it, maybe he'll have fresh ideas about this and he'll certainly bring fresh energy and we can we can do something with it.

When she called and said let's do this with the Mummy, with that particular book with Ramsey, what did you think?

I thought it was very exciting. But I thought it was a tremendous responsibility because the book doesn't have charge to vote in fans it does, and it's like nobody wanted me to muscle in and make fifty percent of it at Christopher Rice novel because up until that point, Christopher rice novels had been mostly contemporary, gritty crime thrillers with a lot of gay characters and some political themes in them, but nothing historical, nothing period unless you're counting

Stuff, and fans get very possessive.

Those are all reasons why I wouldn't do it alone. To do it in collaboration with Mom, that makes sense.

As a writer.

I'm curious how it were, and then we'll move on from it. Bed I'm really I'm curious because I used to co write with a writer. But really what I did is I wrote it, and then I gave it to her and she added some flavor, and then I changed it a little bit more, and then we turned it in.

But that was our process. That's how we did it. What was your process? How did you to merge together to write it?

Well, we sat down together at a table much like this one, with a lot of caffeine and some cats on the periphery.

And some relatives and the sketch track.

The sketch She loves the sketch pad and felt detail because I think it's make a nap.

I can see in the sketch pad, and I need that. I see music. It's like they're like mountain ranges to me.

When I do shows, I have computers, iPads everything. I need a piece of paper. I need to write out my segments. I need to write out teezers.

Because my active writing it out is also part.

Of the Often don't even go back to the map. Got it in your head?

No, But but that was the first part of the answer. So we had that big intensive meeting and then she had the faith in me to go off and write a complete draft on my own. Was going to happen, to plot the beats the island, And then she pulled that draft apart. We sat down again and then I went off and wrote a second draft and she did the final pass. And I think the final pass was

And I think it does.

It's almost like you were a chef and you were the head cook, and you assembled the ingredients and got the base going and then came in with the seasonings and the flavorings and the things that make the dish the dish. That's that's really quite cool. I want to ask you you tell the story. In fact, it was read to me last night. You have a lot of fans, both of you do, and I said, I'm bring up to the rices to interview them. People were fainting. I think it were about you. People faint around me.

Just out a correl girl here, he's here.

But you were quoted about being a fish out of water in New Orleans when you got there from San Francisco. That's one of the quotes in the media. You know, here, I was suddenly a polo shirt wearing whatever in the middle of Orleans. When I visited you, you were very entrenched in Orleans, and you even owned the convent at the time as well.

I did the whole block, the whole block city block.

What was it that made you come to the West Coast.

Well, two things. Christopher moved back out to the West Coast. He'd been born in northern California and it was really his home California. He was much more Californian than a Southern boy. He moved back out, and my husband died and I was alone in that vast house. There was no son, you know, coming in and out with his friends. There was no husband. He was gone, and I realized I wanted to be out near Christopher.

I really did.

And also, I've spent many, many years of my life in California.

Right.

I lived in northern California for years, and at this point I've lived in California longer than I ever lived in anywhere. Yeah, it's righted, Well, sure, it's my home. It's influenced New Orleans has influenced all of my writing. But I've also I came to California for the first time at four years old on a train with my mom. We stayed in Echo Park area, you know, visitor our aunt. I remember La really well. I remember the places we went, the things we did, so it was natural to come

Let's talk two things I love to talk at parties, sex and politics and religion, because these are themes of your books. One of the Wikipedia things they say about the original Ramses, it was interesting to me they talked about sexual fluidity.

The sexual fluidity of.

Rice's characters are continued in this book because of course they see Lestott and Louis's sexually fluid, and so I guess they saw some of the characters in Ramses as sexually fluid.

Sexual fluidity is a.

Big topic nowadays, a non binary gender and all this kind of stuff. You have written your characters, even characters.

Back in the day. I don't want to say it's sexually ambiguous, but they sort of.

Follow their hearts and their passions and wherever their passions lead. So how do your characters fit into this sexual fluidity conversation that's going on.

I have real trouble remembering that I have a gender. I have never felt comfortable being talked about as a woman or identified as a female.

I justin neither. But it happens miss your beard croatia.

But it's something I've never been comfortable with. And when I started to write, I didn't even think about it. I didn't even think about gay overtones to Louis and the Stot. I simply wrote about them in the way that seemed natural to me. And I remember a brilliant man, Richard Silbert, who was the head of Paramount at that time, briefly the head of Paramount. He was actually a famous you know, working on the craft of movies. He was a sect designer or a brilliant said design But anyway,

It comes across in the writing. It doesn't come across as contrived.

It comes as Stilton and the characters would do this.

That's it just seems like talk religion.

You had a small falling out with the Catholics, at least it was written about. And nowadays, where are you with your faith? I don't want to say your faith, but with your spirituality versus you know, we could all bast a Catholic church. I always tell people big child rapering. You know, I don't really pay attention to it, and I don't. I think anyone that's a member of it is a member of the largest child rapering in the world.

Just what it is.

I can understand.

And yet my mom with a devout Catholic, and I buried her in the church, and I was respectful to the church and everything, because.

That's what you do, you know. But where are you now with that?

In that evolutionary process?

To sum it up briefly, I went back to the church in nineteen ninety eight. I experienced a great desire to go back to God, to go back to the banquet table, to go back to the church that believed in the real presence on the altar and in communion. And for twelve long years I lived as a Catholic, studied as a Catholic, went to church every Sunday, lived and breathed as a Catholic. And what the intense study of the Bible led me to was a total collapse

And.

Really in a sense it had a very bad public profile that I couldn't exist with, and I frankly felt that way about all of it, the whole system. So it quit Christianity publicly. I said, you know, I'm in bed with the devil, and I'm getting it.

I'm an atheist, but I'm not. You know, I know there's wonder and marvel out there. I just don't even worry about it because I figure I'll get to it when I get to it. And if you live a good life, that's a good person, then that's all you can do.

That's not what Christianity really teaches, you know. They at this point they are they're very vengeful. No, they're down to the idea that faith in Jesus is what saves, and that basically living a good life isn't the point. We'll see. For me, it is the point, right, And I have a lot of feelings about how that theological idea permeates and poisons a great deal of their positions and theologies. And a lot of people, who of course are good Christians and well behaved people, don't know that.

I think you does.

That was very much.

Actually, how fun was it to write Cleopatra? It was a lot of harm on. Well, here's what's interesting, Cleopatra.

Well, it's interesting because when we sat down to have our first creative meeting about the book, I was insistent the first book ends with the big cliffhanger.

You know that Cleopatra was.

She survived, I'm sorry, she survived the horrible inferno that no one could survive.

Right, and she.

But the hallmark of her character in that book and in the sequel is that she was brought back from death against her will and without her consent, and thousands of years before, when was her immortal counselor and offered her the elixir, she said, no, I want to die as a queen. So she's not real, right as we all do. And she is not happy to have been

Does seem to be a likable guy, money, a dead person, seem to be a wonderful moment.

And Mom was said, look, there's complexity to this character. There's richness to this character that you're going to miss if we take this approach. But she said, I'll let you try it. And I went off in that first draft and I tried it.

I was wrong.

I was dead wrong.

She was right, and I started writing what it needed to be right away, and I got into her character, and I got into the idea that the physical construct we'd set up in the mythology of the Book of her not knowing if she was the real Cleopatra also kind of dovetailed with the scholarship about her because her history has been written by her defeaters, if you will, the Romans wrote her story.

Hard queen quote in a movie that everything we know about the Vikings was written by Christians who hated them, the records, right, so everything, So everything we know about them, it's completely wrong.

Right you totally.

And then and there are contemporary scholars like Stacy Schiff and and you know, other books that have been written about Cleopatrick that are informed by this, this modern sensibility to do a lot.

Of research about the real Cleopatra when you were.

Last, yes, I did some because it's interesting. There are some things out there that were not true, that were invented by novelists and writers and and other things, and we didn't necessarily want to use those. But I think, look, nobody is We're not making a historical point that Cleopatra and Ramsays are immortal solip for.

Thousands of years. It's got it.

It's not a history, but it's not a piece of historical fiction.

It's this sort of you'll believe everybody.

Yeah, you know, it's it's funny because I think about your villains, they're never.

Really villain No, No, I don't really do they have? They have, just don't.

I mean, even Akasha when she's on her killing spree, she in her mind has a logic for what she's doing and why she's doing it. And you know, Marius, all of them when they go do some some of them do some pretty terrible things.

But when they do them, a lot of times it's.

Not maleficent, it's not evil, it's they're seeing it as something that must be done.

Yeah, I think they're the villain.

Right.

So Cleopatra, I think you know, in this new book, she wakes up pissed, she almost gets burned.

Now she's really goodare But let.

Me let me say something about Christopher's relationship with Cleopatra. I think christ Chris described it eloquently, But what I saw when I was reading that draft was that he had fallen in love with that character. We have to writing. All the writing, all the pro surrounding Cleopatra really was perfect.

Do you fall in love with the character when you're right? Yeah, all the time. All of them are just one or two more in love with some less Who do you more in love?

Oh? I love the vampire less Stott was my whole.

You like him because he's a terrible infant. You love him, you love that.

I love him because he's really what I would like to be.

Oh see, Louis is who I would like to be. Or Marius. Okay, louis a little whiny.

Okay, but Marius, you know, with the well I'd like to be armand but who doesn't want to be sixteen and.

Greet Marius has ruthless side.

Oh yeah, with the keeper of those who must see?

Yeah, I mean he thinks nothing of burning to a cinder somebody.

I thought about being one of the redheaded twins, but just because they were red headed twins and that would be fun. I can't wait for everything you're working on. I am your client, both of you.

I am.

I am your consumer. I will be in front of the Vambire Chronicles weekly. I will be there.

I can't wait to get a hold of the new book and read it. I've read all the others. I just finished Atlantis. I was a little slow on Atlantis. I like you know, but I got to it, and I read the original back in eighty nine, so I've already read the first book of this sequence. I cannot wait to get to it. The Vampire Chronicles had a long life. Hazzle Hazle is still living. They are immortal. Is Ramsey on the track now to become another immortal?

Another immortal?

Well, you know, another you know, like four or five, six, seven books?

Oh yeah, I think that could happen. I you know, I think that, well, you know, when I reached the point that I can't write them any longer. I think Christopher could write the Ramses books and continue them if he wants to do it.

Do you know if my mother were a famous writer and she just said I could pass the mantle to my son, I would be jumping up and down and screaming.

She said it while ago, So I jumped up and down. Then yes, yeah, we.

Wanted to do the third book. We've got a plot. We want to take it right into the war, you know, and we want to use war responsibly, which I think you should do in a fantasy novel.

What does it mean for immortals to have to look at war and see to not be able.

To really and have to see it.

It repeating, because one thing I've learned.

I'm only fifty five, but I have learned now that I've been in entertainment and talk radio and everything. I basically do the same show now I did twenty five years ago. It's the same topics. It's just different people. It's just you know that the headlines change, but they don't, you know. And so if you were an immortal, you would know that. You would know that there's cycles of human nature and you would know which one. Oh, they're in their war cycle now, then they'll come their peace

Do you think they before I let you both go?

Now you've written immortals too, Do they pity us?

Do they envy us? Do they?

The longer they're immortal, the more they fall in love with us. The longer you're with someone, the more you can see, you can see their beauty. I think that's what I got out of the Vampire Chronicles.

Eventually they appreciate, they appreciate us, and they respect us.

How many times have either of you been asked would you become immortal? Many?

Many times, countless times. Of course I would anything. Well, I wouldn't say anything.

But I'm determined I'm going to be a downloaded intelligence that they'll download me to a computer and to let the san Ja nippero on Netflix, so they'll upload me to the cloud.

And I'm hoping it's a Mac and not a PC, so I do a crash. I'm upping. We're going to continue.

I could talk for an hour and a half to these two. I've loved talking to Anne over the years that she's come on my show. Like I counted last night, she's been on my show twelve times, every time around a book or something that was going on, and it's always a delight and a joy to speak with her. Chris has become a friend. We're both local. His Instagram's hysterical. You're so supportive of authors.

No I know you know this, but you really are.

And you show up at the book events and you both treat books like they're still golden little marvels, and their respect for the written word and the respect for other you promote. You both promote other novelists and other people who that you are excited about. That's important today when the arts are very frowned upon and reading more than one hundred and twenty eight characters is not really what people do. So I know they're going to enjoy

Is, I hope we'll be having a good time. Thank you. Well, hey, you know what, it could happen. It could happen.

We just talked about being immrtal It could happen.

Yeah, well, I'm surprised to be alive at all.

Actually, so am.

I I lived when there was the eighties, the seventies, the nineties, the Lord. I'm glad you are, and I'm glad you're still writing, and I'm glad you're writing with your son, Chris.

It's an exciting collaboration.

Thank you, exciting.

I'm perrel I'm going to continue to be the luckiest guy in Los Angeles today as I sit having coffee while I'm having tea with two of the most prolific and important writers in America today.

And that's a non overstatement. Just because I'm here with them. Look it up.

They are read a book. It's actually good for you. You can read it on your iPad if you want to, but read a book.

Read there. They're really good. I am Corel. Be who you want to be, so long as it doesn't hurt anybody, and.

Happy freaking New Year's Yeah, it's broadcasting from a completely different point of view.

Yours.

Listen daily to.

The Corel cast on your favorite streaming service. It's broadcasting from a completely different point of view.

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