Anne Rice

I told a friend last week that Anne Rice was "alright".

I think I was afraid of hearing her say she worshipped Anne Rice. Or that she believed in vampires, witches, and loved the Sleeping Beauty series. So I play down how much I love Anne Rice, because while my blogs reveal much about my life, they are only presentations of myself while I keep so many other things secret.

I used to hate Anne Rice. Despised her and all her wretched books. Why? Because over and over again I ran into the same people, who would say "Omg, I LOVE Anne Rice. I SOOO want to be a vampire! Have you read her Sleeping Beauty series?! It's so hot!" and etc, etc.

All through my teenage years, the only people strange enough to accept me were goths and hippies, and for the most part I hated both groups as a whole. The goths loved Anne Rice because they fulfilled some sort of fantasy that required one to have white makeup and really tacky black clothes and silver ornaments. Granted, I've always been a fan of the color black, but it's because I want to go unnoticed, which to me is the complete opposite of most goths I meet. And of course hippies loved Anne Rice because of her obsession with magic, which they interpreted as Wiccan and reinforced their own fucking obsession with witches, spells, and nature. It should be noted though, that most of the people I'm thinking of at the moment were both hippies and goths by this definition.

And since most of the people I knew who loved Anne Rice believed in Wicca, and were more or less obsessed with it, I despised Anne Rice the more for promoting what I saw as The Bullshit Religion of bullshit religions. My thoughts were that history more or less teaches us that Wicca was (as best we can guess) the religion of the druids of northern Europe; its proponents today glorify in calling it a pagan religion (which today requires knowledge and refutation of the dominant christian religion in Anglosphere); being a "pagan" religion, it was outlawed by the Catholic church eons ago, and if it was one thing the Catholics were good at, it was killing people, and they more or less did a thorough and fantastic job of killing anyone they declared enemies of the church throughout the past thirteen centuries; Wicca, obviously an enemy of the church, was eliminated completely, its priests and priestesses killed, its traditions outlawed. Granted, it still survived through history by underground tradition--youth wanting to revert to older theories and ideas, a force that still drives Wicca today. But really, no one alive today or even a hundred years ago (when it first started to grow in strength as a re-found religion) really knows what those ancient druids practiced or believed, and what is known as Wicca today is only recreation, fantasy, make-believe, story-telling, and adolescent magic-making.

Try to get any fucking Wiccan to explain to you how the religion was passed down to modern day. Or just ask them to explain how they know that what they're practicing, or what they believe, is what the Druids believed.

Take Christianity for example: Christianity has been the dominant religion in the Western World for over two thousand years. We have written records that set down belief and practice in clear, black and white (and red) on paper. But these records we have today have discrepancies, and there are enough questions about the authenticity of today's bible in comparison to the bible of a thousand or two thousand years ago. We have biblical books that aren't even part of the canonical bible, but are still attributed to prophets and included in christian bibles of the past. And no one can really agree on anything about Christianity. And this is a religion we know very much about--its history, its birth, and its predominant practices and beliefs.

So how the fuck would a Wiccan really know anything about their religion's past, when the best experts in its theology and practices are archeologists and humbug Anne Rice-reading "witches and priests"?

I once saw, while browsing through Barnes & Noble, a book called "The Teen Witch's Handbook". Opening it with dignified and secular horror, I saw a chapter entitled "The Don't Call Me Spell" and another, "The Make Him Worship You" spell. Of course the book's introduction claimed it was authentic Wicca, passed down by authentic priests blah blah blah like the noise of every Wiccan I've had to listen to all my life.

So Anne Rice became deeply connected in my mind with hippies, goths, and bullshit. Then, when I was 21, I was flipping through the channels and I saw Interview With The Vampire was just starting, and having remembered my parents watching it in my childhood, I started watching. It was fascinating to me how amazingly human the story and its characters were. Here were no pale reflections of the goths I had known and their obsession of Anne Rice seemed disconnected from what I was watching. Here was a movie with real heart and wisdom--something I still don't see often. I immediately bought every Anne Rice book on Amazon, because I am a complete and utter spendthrift when it comes to things that move me emotionally--just like any woman.

What did I discover? I didn't become obsessed with vampires as so many teenagers (and would-be teenagers in their later years of life) have; I loved her style of writing (the way a person tells a story in continous quotations), and the focus on human emotions her novels maintained. Plus, I was fascinated that a woman could write from a male perspective so close to my own. Besides, I've said it before, but I loved the way her stories seem so attractive at first, but by the end have me reeling in horror and existential despair.

So I read Anne Rice. I love Anne Rice. Her books help keep me connected with humanity and emotions, when I sometimes fear that I'm too much the cold and unemotional asshole to ever care about anyone other than myself. And then they also make me care about myself, and remind me that what I feel and believe is far more important that what others believe.

Do I believe in vampires? No. Do I believe in witches? Not really. Do I believe in the supernatural? Definitely, though I try to hide it. There was a time when I was a teenager that I could believe anything, and I could feel magic all around me; I remember that I could feel spirits comforting me as I cried over women, and I still feel and know spirits that haunt my old home and torment me when I live there(and I'm not the only one). I still feel that woods and night time are magical. I dream of loghouses and taverns, woods and beer and a feeling of community.

The first book I read of Anne Rice's was Memnoch the Devil; it just arrived first, among all the books I ordered, and so... Anyway, the universe she creates in it is the one I believe in; it seemed to confirm everything I believed--that heaven exists, but God doesn't care; that there is no evil devil, and no eternal hell of fire and brimstone; that purgatory is very real, and that we must atone for our sins to find peace; and finally that the only way to endure is to forgive ourselves and God for everything we do and He allows. I was also delighted to find that the term "Savage Garden" originated with her perspective of the universe, as the band of the same name was my favorite music as a teenager, and that I saw the world as being the same Savage Garden.

So I love Anne Rice, but I desperately to be associated in any way with her whining, delusional, fanatical readers who prefer fantasy, make-believe, and magic to reality and realistic imagination. And I lie and say I don't feel too much for her works.