Thursday 03 November 2005
Anne Rice decides to ride the wave of religious novel popularity
The Gospel According to Anne - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com
In an interview by Charlie Rose, Rice stated that Jesus is only 8 years old at the end of this "first" book (she's planning more)... I was going to say -- at least Jesus' life was about 500 years shorter than Lestat's, so there would be a limit to how far this series could drag on -- but that's not exactly true, as Jesus has lived on for over 2000 years now, so this could be quite a bottomless well for her...
The Gospel According to Anne - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com
But what's she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other.
Am I the only one thinking she sounds a bit arrogant for being humbly devoted to Christ?
And am I the only one who had the suspicion that she may have been thinking...
Let's see. I wrote violent books, some romanticizing murderous mythical creatures of evil, as well as both heterosexual and homosexual sado-masochistic sexual erotic novels involving a lot of bondage, whips, sex slaves, and fetishes. Now how can I ride the Left Behind/Da Vinci Code/Passion of the Christ wave, & get a bunch of novels published about the life of the ready-made popular character of Jesus Christ from a first person narrative, and make money, without having an outcry against me, and a bunch of death threats & such? Oh, I know, I'll declare myself born again in faith, hide behind the Catholic Church, and I can render myself to appear saved from my past sins in the eyes of a potential target market.
Okay, so maybe I'm being awfully cynical. Maybe she has been saved, and regained her faith.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
In his interview with Rice, Charlie Rose asked a question in the line of whether her (late) husband, an atheist, was an influence in keeping her away from religion. 'Heaven knows', women have been dissuaded from the things important to them by their husbands for thousands of years. But she insisted that wasn't the case, and that her husband was more than happy to go through another marriage ceremony in her church. But I must say, when she was speaking of her late husband's atheism, I did hear a tiny note of regret, or perhaps even bitterness, though of course I could be mistaken and perhaps it was just the regret of a widow about her husband's death in general.
One thing I noticed, the article describes her erotic novels as "soft-core S&M".
But that kind of gives the impression that they're just about people playing dress up as french maids & gladiators, tying each other's hands to the bed posts, & some spankings.
Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty Trilogy novels went a tad farther than that. They were explicit descriptions of sex slaves bought & sold, auctioned on an auction block nude with horse tails on dildos hanging out their bums, people made to pose naked as statues in sexual positions while being taunted & sexually teased, sex slaves held in chains & shackles while being forced under threat of violence to scrub floors, and floggings where they are bruised with welts from whips, with no boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual sexual contact.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But I just think it's important to distinguish those novels from the average sexy novel on the market.
posted by Chloe | Thursday 03 November 2005 10:08 PM
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