Anne Rice returns to the religion she knew as a child

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - Ultimately, Anne Rice decided that being an atheist was just too damned hard.

She had been raised in a devoutly Catholic New Orleans family, and with a child's eyes and accepting heart had experienced "the beauty of God."

But years later, as a young woman, she'd found herself filled with questions, doubts. Was the church too rigid, and did it exert too much power over the individual? More important, did God even exist?

"I stopped talking to God," Rice recalls. "I went into atheism with almost a religious passion. I believed it was reality; it had to be faced. The church couldn't have been correct."

The years passed. She got married. She had a daughter, but her daughter died of leukemia at age 5. She had a son, Christopher, who lived _ and is now a novelist, though not as famous as his mother. How could he be, when Mother is the author of "Interview With the Vampire," "The Vampire Lestat," "The Witching Hour" and a host of other international best-sellers?

In the 1990s, though, in her 50s, Rice found herself being pulled back to God. Atheism, it turns out, had been for her not a true expression of logic and reason but an emptiness, even a torment.

"It's a more strenuous path than the religious path, because you're then going to say that there is no God, there is no reason (for anything), that people on Earth are the only (way) to provide any meaning. That's a rough road to travel.

"When you lose a child, you're telling yourself as an atheist, 'I'm never going to see that child again in any form.' That's a hell of a lot harder than a religion, which gives you the consolation that you will see that child again in heaven. It's hard being an atheist. It's tough."

Rice recounts her religious journey in "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession." It's the first nonfiction title of her career, and it's a rather short book, just 256 pages. But its easy elegance is one of its strengths.

As Rice writes in the book: "I want to tell, as simply as I can _ and nothing with me as a writer has ever really been simple _ the story of how I made my decision of the heart."

Revealing too much about that decision would ruin the book for readers. Suffice it to say this memoir reads like a series of epiphanies without ever becoming overwrought or dogmatic.

As she returned to the faith she'd grown up with, Rice made discoveries not only about religion but also about elements of her own life, including the supernatural novels that brought her millions of fans _ the "Vampire Chronicles," which include Memnoch the Devil, The Tale of the Body Thief and The Vampire Armand; and her series of books about an extended family of modern-day witches, the Mayfairs, who appear in titles such as Lasher and Taltos. She now thinks these uncanny books were a spiritual response to her declaration of atheism.

"With the vampires, I was creating a shadow world of (the sacred). The doom of the characters was my grief for my lost faith. And the metaphors were obvious; the blood was a Eucharistic metaphor, though I didn't think of it that way at the time.

"The blood passed from one to one to one, and they were all connected to the Mother and the Father. The whole cosmology was my being unable to put aside my religious childhood, being obsessed with it from outside, being obsessed with it in retrospect, being obsessed with it subconsciously."

Those books made her, along with Stephen King and Clive Barker, a modern master of what some people call horror fiction or, to use a term more quaint but perhaps more descriptively accurate, "the weird tale."

But there will be no more books about mummies, witches or vampires from Rice.

"I feel like I'm living in a world now where I will see my daughter again, and I will see the Lord. I talk to him every day of my life.

"How could I write about Lestat and Louis and Gabrielle and Armand, these lost souls? I couldn't just crank out adventures with them. It can't be done. So I had to stop and consecrate my works to Christ."

She has done exactly that. Three years ago she shocked some readers with "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about Jesus' boyhood based in part on the New Testament Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) and partly upon biblical scholarship.

A sequel, "The Road to Cana," saw print this spring, and both books earned favorable reviews from the likes of The New York Times and Library Journal. Rice is working on a third book in the series.

As for her previous novels featuring vampires, ghosts and so on, she makes no apologies.

"All those books were totally sincere, and they reflect a long journey to Christ. I have never felt those books did harm to people. In fact, I've had people come up and tell me those books caused them to go back to the church! I don't regret them in any way. What I regret as a Christian is every unkind and mean and inconsiderate thing I ever did to anybody."

Rice celebrated her 67th birthday recently, just three days before "Called Out of Darkness" was published. She no longer lives in New Orleans; home these days is Rancho Mirage, about 120 miles east of Los Angeles near Joshua Tree National Park.

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Slender with salt-and-pepper hair, Rice does not look her age. She smiles readily, but her eyes can be solemn, for she has seen her share of loss. Alcoholism claimed her mother when Anne was in her early teens.

Her daughter, Michele, died in 1972; much more recent was the death of her husband, the talented painter and poet Stan Rice (Some Lamb, Red to the Rind), who succumbed to brain cancer in 2002 just a few months after being diagnosed.

Her late husband provided inspiration for Lestat, the powerful _ and often brash _ vampire who became hero and narrator of many of Rice's books.

"Lestat was the person of action that I'd like to be, the strong one. He was always more of an ideal. And based partly on my husband. My husband was really Lestat, insofar as any (real person) is a fictional character. Ultimately, the characters become themselves."

Given Stan Rice's passing, perhaps it's appropriate that Lestat's voice will not be heard again. But the voice of Louis, Lestat's vampire companion, has not disappeared from the page.

Rice seems delighted when I tell her that the authorial accent of "Called Out of Darkness" reminds me of Louis, who narrated "Interview With the Vampire," Rice's 1976 debut.

"Of course! I'm glad you picked up on it. It's Louis. They (Louis and Lestat) both are sides of me, but Louis was obviously the melancholy, grief-stricken side _ yet also very much taking beauty drop by drop."

In Neil Jordan's 1994 film adaptation of "Interview," Tom Cruise portrayed Lestat, while Brad Pitt claimed the role of Louis. Rice's eyes twinkle as she says something no other woman on the planet can say:

"Brad Pitt," she observes, "played me in the movie."

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© 2008, The Kansas City Star.