In late fall of 2021, I was overjoyed to receive an advanced reader copy of Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris by Anne Rice and Christopher Rice in the mail. I wanted to begin reading immediately, but I knew that its release date was months away and I have a system for reviewing books from the big/traditional publishers. I like to read them right before the publish date so that I can write my review and add my voice to the big push in the initial weeks of sales.

The systems works.

The system failed me this time.

On December 11, 2021, I woke to the news that Anne Rice had died. I’m not going to lie. I was not okay. I believe in a lifetime there are countless books that will open your eyes and perhaps, even change your life. On the flipside, I think there are only a handful of authors for each of us that we really connect with, whose books feel like they came into our life at exactly the right time, and give us something so unexpected that we become lifelong fans.

In the 90s, like many others in my generation, I discovered Anne Rice. I remember seeing the trailer for Interview with the Vampire, and being  completely drawn in by its decadence and quiet terror. Naturally, when I read it was based on a book, I visited the local library and borrowed the tome, taking it home and savoring it like the elegant experience it was created to be.

I. Was. Transported.

Louis and Claudia, and yes, the infamous Lestat, leaped from the page. New Orleans lived and breathed. Paris called to me. The wanton brutality was outmatched only by the brilliant storytelling with such attention to detail that I knew I was reading something unlike anything I’d encountered before.

What grabbed me most, however, was the relationship between Louis and Lestat. It was so beautifully complicated, so tragically romantic. As a closeted gay teen in a fundamentalist, Christian home, I had been taught early in life that men were incapable of loving each other in that way. Certainly, they could lust for each other. They could thirst for each other’s bodies, but to connect on the level of the soul was impossible. Yet, here, in the pages of Interview, was the story of two men who were undeniably in love.

Yes, they were vampires. Yes, that love was sometimes toxic and sometimes seemed as fragile as spun sugar, but it was love nonetheless, no less real or improbable than the hundreds of romantic stories that had been told about straight couples over the centuries.

Naturally, when I finished that first book, I moved onto The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned. I discovered The Witching Hour and Cry To Heaven, a non-supernatural story that remains my favorite Anne Rice novel to this day.

What I eventually realized was that in a world created by Anne Rice, gender and sexuality were fluid, love was powerful, and terror was pliable, created by mood and atmosphere rather than broken bodies and severed limbs.

I came to believe that she was writing for all of us who lived on the fringes of society, those who were marginalized and exiled. In a way I not only felt seen, but I felt understood. I knew, even behind the closed door of the closet, that there was at least one person in the world who would “get me.”

This was further underlined when the world at large was introduced to Christopher Rice, the author’s son. He is an out and proud gay man who inherited his mother’s storytelling gift. What was more important, however, was the to see the utter pride and adoration that the two had for each other. What struck me most is that Rice did not accept her son’s gayness because in her eyes, there was nothing to accept.

He was her son. She loved him. That was enough.

If you’ve never watched the two of them sit and speak about writing and about being a family, I can’t urge you enough to go to YouTube and look up their book tours they’ve done together. The conversations are hilariously funny, and their affection for each other is genuine.

Of course, her life has not been without controversy. In the early 2000s, she announced she was no longer going to write about vampires. She turned, instead, to a more religious topic, novelizing portions of the life of Jesus Christ. She was taking a personal journey of her own, and many of her less ardent fans stepped away from her.

For me, it only made me love her more.

I had made a similar journey, you see. The religious world in which I’d been raised had turned its back on me, and I had floundered. I understood what it was to believe and to feel like the outlet for that belief is being withheld from you. I knew what it was like to know that God you had been told would love you for eternity actually hated you for something that you could not change.

I also understood why Rice needed space between herself and the vampire Lestat. She had spoken often in interviews about the ties between the Brat Prince and her husband, the poet and artist, Stan Rice. It made perfect sense to me that after his death, she would need space and time.

Of course, eventually, the author did return to the vampires, producing more epic volumes. She also, for the first time, entered the world of werewolves and the stunning mythology of Atlantis.

Then, just a couple of years ago, it was announced that Anne Rice and her son would be publishing a book together. Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra was unexpected to say the least. A sequel to her 1989 novel, Ramses the Damned, the duo crafted a continuation of that epic, immersing themselves in the early 20th century with the flair of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the mystery and settings of Agatha Christie.

It was seamlessly written with beautiful prose that somehow reflected the style of both mother and son. Ramses was one of Rice’s lesser known works that never got the attention it deserved, as far as I was concerned. Then again, like so many introverted youths, I’d gone through an “Egyptian phase” in my childhood where I devoured every story and myth from the region so perhaps I was a natural candidate for its fandom.

Which brings us to the present, I suppose.

From where I’m sitting in my living room, I can see Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris by Anne Rice and Christopher Rice sitting on my bookshelf.

I want to read it.

I want to review it.

But somewhere, deep down inside me, I know that this is the last new Anne Rice book that I will ever read. It is the last new tale from an author who, in her own way, had saved my life once upon a time. It is the last time I will read and love her characters in situations I’ve never read before.

So, for now, it will remain on the bookshelf. For now, I will admire it from afar. For now, I will give myself one more day to deny that it is the last.

For today, I will simply give thanks that this amazing author blessed us with her prose and her time. Beyond all else, she proved that immortality is attainable and that love is universal, and for that, I will be forever grateful.