SOURCE: “The Devil and Anne Rice,” in Rolling Stone, July 13-27, 1995, pp. 92-4, 97-8.

In the following interview, Rice discusses her literary career, critical reception, supernatural themes in her fiction, and Memnoch the Devil.

For nearly 20 years now, Anne Rice has been telling stories that share secrets—secrets of life and death, of sex and the soul, of monsters and humans. In particular, though, it is with her series of novels known as The Vampire Chronicles that Rice has created her most binding mix of mystery and meaning as well as what may prove her most enduring body of literature. Interview With the Vampire (1976)—the first of the Vampire Chronicles and Rice's first published novel—is a horror narrative unlike any other. It is the story of Louis de Pointe du Lac, an 18th-century New Orleans plantation owner who has lost faith in his life and in God...