Friday, July 30, 2010

HA! I knew it was just to sell books!

Several years ago, when Anne Rice declared that she'd found God and become a Christian after the death of her husband Stan, I recall crying foul, saying that Rice had made her fortune and her literary mark on the world with books that celebrated every kind of sin and perversion you could think of, from a whole series of S&M books to a lauded series of vampire novels and witch novels that discussed rape and incest as desirable things--there was no vile or disgusting action she wasn't willing to explore for publicity and to sell her books, which were, in later years, often poorly written. This saddened me because Interview With A Vampire was a wonderful gothic novel, full of atmospheric prose and memorable characters. So I knew the woman was capable of great writing, but it became apparent to me that she was running out of ideas and had started to believe a bit too much of her fan mail, and was coasting on her previous reputation.

And I noticed that when she became a Christian, Rice didn't repudiate her former works that celebrated Satan and evil and all that is dark and undead. She still seemed more than willing to cash in on the royalties from her pornographic novels while claiming to be free of evil. This whole conversion smelled of a writer desperate to plumb the Christian right market for her books, since she'd already sucked the left wing new age markets dry. She wrote several books about the life of Christ, and a memoir about her conversion, and, as I suspected, when the market didn't prove to be quite as fertile as the non-believers and new age liberals, she sent out declarations that she is no longer a Christian. How convenient. Here's the scoop from Media Bistro, below.

Anne Rice: 'I Quit Christianity'
By Jason Boog on Jul 29, 2010 04:03 PM

In a dramatic series of Facebook posts, novelist Anne Rice declared that she is no longer a Christian.

Check it out: "I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen."

Rice wrote Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, a memoir about her own conversion to Christianity--making the post a bit more surprising. UPDATE: Our readers respond to Rice's post.

In another post, Rice also admitted, "I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity." So far, her posts have drawn nearly 2,000 comments and well over 3,000 "likes." (Via Gawker)

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