Called the "diva of dark forces," by Book's Julia Kamysz Lane, Anne Rice is considered one of the leading practitioners of Gothic writing in contemporary literature. With three dozen books published, bestselling novelist R ice has built her career, according to New York Times Book Review critic Daniel Mendelsohn, by sticking to "the Big Themes: good versus evil, mortality and immortality." Indeed, these themes have provided Rice with such an abund ance of material that, as Bob Summer observed in Publishers Weekly, "she needs two pseudonyms--Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure--to distinguish the disparate voices in her books, [which have] won both critica l acclaim and a readership of cult proportions." Under her own name, Rice crafts novels about the bizarre and the supernatural; under the Rampling pseudonym, she has written contemporary and mainstream fiction; and under the Roquelaure nom de plume she has depicted...