Anne Rice, the renowned author behind the Vampire Chronicles series of novels—Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned, was interviewed recently by The Daily Beast.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, the “queen” of vampire fiction, Anne Rice, opens up about her Twilight “beef,” her feelings about HBO’s True Blood, why she thinks teens these days are obsessed with vampires, and her upcoming foray into the world of werewolf novels, The Wolf Gift, which will be released Feb. 12.
We won’t share the whole interview – just bits and pieces related to True Blood and Charlaine Harris. Here are the highlights…
So what’s your take on the Twilight series? It really does seem to go against the grain in its depiction of vampires.
I think the concept is so rich in itself. It’s like the concept of the cowboy or the detective. Vampires have become almost like a genre, like the Western. What I see happening, with writers like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer, is the domestication of the vampire. I was more interested in a powerful, Old World figure that had a lot of knowledge, experience, and was surrounded by a lot of glamour and mystery. I wanted to keep the romance. I loved the idea of these people gaining wisdom as they aged, and how that might cause them to be ever more tormented by the fact that they don’t really belong in the world and they prey on human beings, who they’ve really come to appreciate. Charlaine Harris is doing something different by imagining what it’s like if vampires are legal and you have them living in your Southern town, and I think she gets a tremendous amount of energy out of that. She’s very witty—there’s a lot of satire there—and on the HBO show True Blood, there’s even a romance with Vampire Bill.
Back to True Blood, how do you feel about the show’s depiction of vampires as these uninhibited, primal, sexual beings?
I’m a fan of the show. I see it as a logical part of it all. [Harris] has expanded the sexuality that’s inherent in that idea. I didn’t think of that, but as my books went on, I involved my vampires in more sexuality. But I couldn’t go as far as Charlaine Harris did, because I had said that my vampires can’t have sex; that the act of drinking blood is orgasmic for them. She’s doing it a different way. She’s saying that this blood drinker must also be dynamite in bed. Makes sense!
I think True Blood does werewolves justice with Alcide.
Oh, yeah, I like Alcide. I like that actor [Joe Manganiello] a lot, and I think the character’s hot.
UGH! Not only does she mention Sookie having a romance with Bill…but she says how hot she finds Alcide too! ARGH!
If you would like to read her entire interview – click here!
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