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Author Anne Rice
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for Newsweek
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Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt
 
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Gothic Author Anne Rice Turns Her Attention to Jesus Christ in New Novel

Michael Ireland
Assist News Service

CBN.com LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA (ANS) -- According to secular news sources Gothic mystery writer Anne Rice has turned to Christ and will now only write "for the Lord."

An article by David Gates, Senior Writer, to be published in the Newsweek Oct. 31, 2005 issue, says that many of Rice's fans have been worried about her.

After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 65, hasn't published a book since 2003's Blood Chronicle, the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series.

Gates says her readers may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at age 18.

"They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there -- and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as Interview With the Vampire."

Gates asks: " What's up with her? "

"For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'."

In two weeks, says Gates, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and -- under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure -- of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself.

"I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord."

Gates says it's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.

Gates writes: "Rice knows Out of Egypt and its projected sequels -- three, she thinks -- could alienate her following.

As Rice writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career."

Gates says she sees a continuity with her old books, "whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease," he writes.

"I mean, I was in despair," Rice told Gates.

In the afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."

In order to render such a hero and his world believable, Gates says Rice "immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship -- some of which she found disturbingly skeptical."

Gates says she also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from The Robe to The Passion of the Christ ("I loved it"). She also dipped into previous novels, from Quo Vadis to Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series.

Rice says she can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage, Gate explains.

He also writes that Rice has also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. For example, no one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it -- or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. Rice has also used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the non-canonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.

"Rice's most daring move, though," says Gates, "is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty."

"There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits.

According to Gates, the advance notices say she's pulled it off. The Kirkus Reviews pronounces her Jesus "fully believable."

However, Gates says it's hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when Jesus delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!"

He says this attempt to render a child's point of view "can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway."

He cites the line: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good."

Gates says the novel's best scene is a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan: "smiling, then weeping, then raging."

He says "Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow."

Rice already has much of the next volume written. But she says she has been advised not to talk about it.

"If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she told Gates, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes redemption."

(Read the article in Newsweek)

Rice's Latest Novel: Interview with a Messiah

Dave Goldiner, in an article originally published in the October 24, 2005 New York Daily News, says: "Anne Rice has found God -- and her legion of devoted fans will have to get used to life without her blood-soaked vampire novels."

Goldiner says the best-selling queen of Gothic fiction told Newsweek her upcoming book, and all future works, will be written in the voice of Jesus Christ.

Rice has sold 136 million copies of her 25 books. Her long-awaited book is titled Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt about the 7-year-old Jesus, is narrated by Christ himself.

Goldiner says Rice, 65, returned to the Catholic Church after a life-threatening medical scare and now plans to write three sequels about the life of Christ.

"She knows it might not go over big with fans who ate up her chronicles of witches, warlocks, and soft-core S&M encounters," says Goldiner.

He says Rice insists the gore-soaked evildoers that populate her previous novels like Interview with a Vampire only reflected her own longstanding spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair," she says.

"In the end, she predicts readers may find more of what they are looking for in Jesus than Dracula," Goldiner writes.

Goldiner says: "Christ is 'the ultimate supernatural hero,' (Rice) writes in the new book's afterword. "The ultimate immortal of them all."

Kim Covert, writing for The Canadian Press, says Rice, "built her reputation writing books about vampires and witches, exploring her own faith as her characters wrestled with timeless themes of good and evil.

"Now Anne Rice has taken on the story of Christ himself."

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is a novel written as a first-person account by Jesus of his very early years.

Covert says that in the book's afterword Rice details her research "-- the years she spent studying Christ and his times, delving deeply into academic treatises. So the book should have been a fascinating fictional distillation of all that she learned. Unfortunately, what she has written is worthy of a Sunday-school Life of Jesus. "

Covert writes that Rice starts from a position of absolute faith in the divinity of Jesus. The first thing the small boy in the book does is bring a playmate, whom he'd accidentally killed, back to life.

"In what is apparently the first in a planned series of books Rice addresses none of the scholarly doubt that she must have come across in the course of her study," Covert says.

"Her first-person technique is also problematic, given the age of Jesus at the beginning. What are obviously the remembrances of a grown man are told in the at-times authentic language of a preschooler."

Covert says that Rice attempts to capture the cadences of the verses of the Bible, using commas and "and" a lot: "Meanwhile the Romans tried everywhere in Judea to put down the rebellion, and they still had the Arabs marching with them, and the Arabs burned Judean villages. And the whole family of King Herod was still in Rome fighting and disputing before Augustus, as to who should be King."

She says: "This might have been an interesting device if it had been used through the whole book, but she fails to maintain the rhythm."

Covert explains that what Rice does do well in Christ the Lord is describe Jesus' world, the division of labor -- and impossibility of privacy -- within the extended families, the roles of women and men, of church and state,.

According to The Associated Press (AP), Rice, who developed a cult following with her novels of witches and vampires, "warns her fans they may not want to follow her into the light of her new subject -- Jesus Christ."

An online report states: "Her latest novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is narrated by Christ himself as a seven-year-old boy. The bestselling author of 26 books is already planning three sequels for her new character, although she said they may not be well received by her dedicated fans."

The United Press International (UPI) newswire service, says: "Gothic fiction writer Anne Rice, known for her steamy, blood-soaked vampire tales, says her books from now on will reflect her renewed faith in God."

UPI says: "Although she will most likely lose some readers with her new direction, others may find Jesus satisfies their spiritual needs better than the vampire Lestat, she said."

Of Rice's new work, Kirkus Reviews, says: "A riveting, reverent imagining of the hidden years of the child Jesus. "

"Attacked by a vicious bully, seven-year-old Yeshua employs uncanny powers to drop his assailant onto the sand and then to bring him back to life," the review says.

The reviewer says: "It's the remarkable beginning of the 26th novel by an author whose pulpy vampire chronicles (Blood Canticle, 2003, etc.) hardly prepare us for a book so spiritually potent as this."

It continues: "Following Jesus and his family's journey from Egyptian exile to their ancestral home, it recasts Bible stories (the Magi's visit, the presentation at the temple) in the detailed context of Jewish rebellion against Herod Archelaus, the impious ruler of Israel.

"A cross between a historical novel and an update of Tolstoy's The Gospels in Brief, it presents Jesus as nature mystic, healer, prophet and very much a real young boy.

"Essentially, it's a mystery story, of the child grappling to understand his miraculous gifts and numinous birth. He animates clay pigeons, causes snowfall and dazzles his elders with unheard-of knowledge."

Kirkus Reviews says: "Rice's book is a triumph of tone -- her prose lean, lyrical, vivid -- and character: As he ponders his staggering responsibility, the boy is fully believable -- and yet there's something in his supernatural empathy and blazing intelligence that conveys the wondrousness of a boy like no other."

It adds: "Rice's concluding Author's Note traces the book's genesis to her return to Catholicism in 1993, her voracious reading -- a mountain of New Testament scholarship, the Apochrya, the ancient texts of Philo and Jospephus -- and her passionate search for the Jesus of the Gospels.

Concluding with the comment that, "With this novel, she has indeed found a convincing version of him; this is fiction that transcends story and instead qualifies as an act of faith," Kirkus says: "Joins Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ and Shusaku Endo's A Life of Jesus as one of the bolder re-tellings."


Michael Ireland is an international British freelance journalist. A former reporter with a London newspaper, Michael is the Chief Correspondent for ASSIST News Service of Garden Grove, California.

This report was compiled from online reviews previously appearing on the World Wide Web.

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ASSIST News Service is brought to you in part by Open Doors USA, a ministry that has served the Suffering Church around the world for nearly 50 years. You can get more information by logging onto their website at www.opendoorsusa.org.



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