Anne Rice
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Canticle, the final volume of the series opens with the following lines that
belong to the indomitable vampire Lestat: “I want to be a saint. I want to save
souls by the millions. I want to do good far and wide. I want to fight evil” (3). A
rollicking tale follows, at the end of which Lestat’s thinking comes full circle: he
still longs to be a saint, though he knows that he will never be able to fulfill such
an ambition. As wholly outlandish as the idea of Lestat as a saint may be, it
reminds us, forcefully, of just how linked Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles are,
and always have been, with the religion of the West, Christianity.
Rice, in her “Essay on Earlier Works,” ties The Vampire Chronicles to what
she terms a “long tradition of ‘dark fiction’ which includes some of the most
highly prized religious works read in Western culture.” She goes on to cite
Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, Milton’s Paradise Lost,
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Dickens’s A
Christmas Carol and Great Expectations, Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown,
Melville’s Moby Dick, and the legend of Faust as examples of the tradition of
dark fiction to which, she argues, The Vampire Chronicles and her other novels
belong. Indeed, for Rice, all of her earlier books, like the classics just
mentioned, “involve a strong moral compass. Evil is never glorified in these
books; on the contrary, the continuing battle against evil is the subject of the
work. The search for good is the subject of the work.” They are not in any way
immoral, Satanic, or demonic works, as some, in ignorance, have claimed. What
“unites them is the theme of the moral and spiritual quest,” and each and every
one of them, Rice claims, “reflects a movement towards Jesus Christ.” And this
movement seems to have found its ultimate fulfillment, and expression, in
Rice’s Christ the Lord series.
Justifying the Ways of God to Men
The narrator of the English epic poem Paradise Lost—long-assumed to be
John Milton himself—wrote that one of the purposes of this great work was to
“justify the ways of God to men” (1.26). In The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice
also attempts to justify the ways of God to men. She writes that the “books
transparently reflect a journey through atheism and back to God. It is impossible
not to see this. They reflect an attempt to determine what is good and what is
evil in an atheistic world. They are about the struggle of brothers and sisters in a
world without credible fathers and mothers” and they “reflect an obsession with
the possibility