For three decades, Anne Rice looked for light amid darkness, much like the nefariously soulful bloodsuckers who populate the novels in her best-selling Vampire Chronicles. Today, at the age of 67, Rice says her quest is over. Her autobiography, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, recounts her years of searching and yearning, as well as the life-altering transformations she has experienced in recent years. This deeply moving book (due out October 7) provides a revealing and intimate look at how an artist — and a soul — is transformed.

In this candid interview, Rice takes us on her personal journey.

Tell us about writing your first novel in the fifth grade.
That whole experience was absolutely wonderful. Of course, it wasn’t really a novel, but I felt, as a child, that it certainly was. I wrote it in what was called at the time a 25-cent notebook, which really is quite thick. I wrote on both sides of the pages and even drew a few little illustrations. It was a science-fiction story about a brother and sister who lived on Mars and came to Earth and picked up a man named Jimmy and told him all about Mars. In the end, they turn their spaceship around and heroically drive themselves straight into the sun. The reason this was heroic, and this is the big twist ending, is that they could not return to Mars because that planet’s great disgrace was that it still had slavery.

What was so great about the experience is that all my friends liked the book so much. The oldest sister of a friend said that it was like actually reading a real published book. That was just wonderful.

So even then you were writing about misfits and outcasts searching for their place in the universe, just like in the Vampire Chronicles.
That was something I only realized slowly, that I was writing about these outsiders longing for a way to the inside. I guess it was there in that first book. I know it’s there in the novels I wrote as an adult. Someone pointed out to me that I was writing about outcasts who had found, or were longing to fi nd, their place to belong. I felt like I was only writing about the outcast in everybody. We all feel like that sometimes — sometimes a lot of the time. I know I did.

You’ve said that reading has always been torturous for you because you write five times faster than you read.
I hook in best with fiction in which there is a musical quality, because I am hearing it. But hearing the music of the language requires slow reading. When I was younger, I fell in love with Charles Dickens and Great Expectations. Almost every sentence in that book is beautifully written. The rhythm of the paragraphs to me was something I could really grab on to, but I read it at a snail’s pace because I was hearing it. I never could compete with my friends who learned very early on to simply read, not hear. Often when I’m writing I’m actually talking out loud. People will come into the room and say I look like a madwoman because there I am, mumbling all the words and making all the faces. I’m not mad. I’m not possessed. I’m just hearing it. I’m speaking the book as I write it.

In your autobiography you write, “Nothing with me as a writer has ever really been simple.”
My approach to writing has always been complicated. I’ve always, as a writer, been trying to do four or fi ve things at a time. My sister was a novelist too, and she said frequently that she didn’t really care if anybody took her seriously — she just wanted to tell a good story that she liked. I could never say something like that. I really wanted to be taken seriously, and I really wanted the novels to be memorable. There was always a part of me that wanted to follow the principles of Aristotle — plot, characters, great events, and catharsis.

That probably explains why you have a very passionate readership. There are no casual fans of Anne Rice.
Well, that didn’t really start until after Interview with the Vampire was published in paperback. I went to a signing for The Feast of All Saints, which was not very well received, and I remember a young woman showed up with a copy of Interview with the Vampire. She had covered it with black velvet, and she wanted to show me her favorite paragraph, but she had become so emotional that she couldn’t find it. That was the first reader I really had any contact with. She gave me an indication of what was to come. After that, readers like that would multiply. With each subsequent book, they showed up in greater and greater numbers. It would be very, very emotional. It was so meaningful to know how much these books meant to people.

Why do you think readers connect so deeply with your books?
If I had to analyze it, it’s because I was writing only about characters that I loved. I was not a writer who ever got any energy from writing about characters I hated, which is uncommon in America. There are many writers in this country who build entire careers writing about people they scorn and despise and want to eviscerate. I write about characters I love, and I believe people responded to that. They also responded to the way these characters loved one another and loved the world.

You also mention in the new book that you’d like to be a film producer. What are your plans?
Well, there’s nothing going on right now because I have no money, no power, no studio, no backing. But I do have the best agents in the business and, possibly, there will be things in the future. Today’s Hollywood doesn’t know how to do the Cecil B. DeMille thing, which I love so very dearly. They don’t know how to do Ben-Hur or Quo Vadis or The Robe today. They have no idea. And those are the types of films I would like to make. Mel Gibson made a film [The Passion of the Christ] I would have been very proud to make, but for making it, he was the subject of so much hatred within Hollywood. I think one of the reasons he became so hated is because Hollywood didn’t know how to imitate what he had done. They love a success they can replicate, but they don’t know how to replicate that fi lm, and it’s largely because they don’t understand that degree of faith.

How do you feel about Hollywood’s treatment of your work?
What I’ve found is when my books are bought for a motion picture or a musical, you realize very soon there’s no consensus — even amongst those who bought the books — as to what they mean, and that can be a very painful process. I love the music and lyrics, for example, that Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote for [the Broadway musical] Lestat, and I became very good friends with the director Robert Jess Roth, but there were still many things about the adaptation itself which were hard for me to accept, primarily the treatment of Claudia as almost a comic character. I was totally unprepared for that. Clearly, we didn’t all see the story in the same way. I remain devoted to those people, but it was still an awesome shock. Claudia is not Annie.

The film version of Queen of the Damned was just a swindle, through and through. That film has nothing to do with my novel, except the name. They took the name and told their own story. They told me from the beginning they didn’t want me involved, that they would do whatever they wanted. I begged them not to make it. It was such a swindle — to use the character names, but to throw out my story in favor of overheated cliches. They were seeking a quick buck, and they failed.

You’ve turned a very meaningful page in your own life, but for now the vampires are your legacy. How do you feel about that?
I’m very proud of those books, and I feel they have an enormous amount of moral depth. They are very much about good and evil, and in that regard I’m not sure they’re that different from the books I’m writing today. I’m very pleased that those books have their life, and I’m very willing to see them made into films in the future — or graphic novels or maybe a Showtime or HBO series. I feel the morality is there in those stories. They reflect my life and my search and my grief deeply and accurately, and they are deeply moral.

I do feel, though, that with the new books — the ones about the life of Christ — I am reaching an entirely new audience, and that is exciting as well.

What would you like readers to take from Called Out of Darkness?
That Christianity is as much a commitment of the intellect as it is of the heart. 

J. Rentilly writes about music, film, literature, and culture for a variety of media outlets.
Photo by Todd Williamson/Wireimage for Variety Magazine