{"id":4631,"date":"2008-11-24T00:30:28","date_gmt":"2008-11-24T00:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2008\/11\/the-christhaunted-vampire-nove.html"},"modified":"2008-11-24T00:30:28","modified_gmt":"2008-11-24T00:30:28","slug":"the-christhaunted-vampire-nove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2008\/11\/the-christhaunted-vampire-nove.html","title":{"rendered":"The Christ-Haunted Vampire Novelist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Rice’s vampire novels have sold 100 million copies. She now
\nwrites, as she tells us so candidly in her memoir of conversion, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/strong><\/em>, solely for God. Her story is an old genre: faith and then atheism and then rediscovery
\nof faith. But, because her faith is also profoundly personal and
\nbecause no two persons are identical, her story is a fresh story of conversion (and a good Christmas present book).<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
Questions for conversation: What is your favorite conversion story (and why)? What do you think of the conversion story of celebrities (like Anne Rice)? How much did the artistic, sensory, or aesthetic figure into your conversion? (I haven’t mentioned my book on conversion on this blog in a long time: Turning to Jesus: The Sociology of Conversion in the Gospels<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/strong><\/em>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


\nI
\nhave read and pondered hundreds of conversion stories in print, my
\nfavorites being C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/em><\/strong>, and G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy: The Annotated Edition<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/em><\/strong>. Anne Rice’s memoir
\nis more like Lewis’s than like Chesterton’s, whose style seems to take
\nover everything, in that Rice’s conversion is from front to end sensory
\nand aesthetic.? If Lewis’ conversion placed in his heart the joy he was
\nseeking and if it made sense of all the stories he had explored, Rice’s
\nconversion story is that of the person whose visceral sensory<\/span><\/i>
\nexperiences were not only shaped by the gospel but also found their
\nultimate meaning only in the gospel. <\/p>\n

In one remarkably compact
\nparagraph, which states the theme of her schoolgirl life, Anne Rice says,
\n“It’s important to stress here that my earliest experiences involved
\nbeauty; my strongest memories are of beautiful things I saw, things
\nwhich evoked such profound feeling in me that I often felt pain” (6).
\nAdd to this that she said her early faith was “entirely iconic” (15)
\nand that “the words didn’t matter in those early days. The sentiment,
\nthe sense of the sacred, the sense of the splendid opportunity, were
\nall embodied in the tones and the music” (23). Anne Rice’s faith was
\nmedieval in that, like the ordinary Christian of those days who could
\nnot read, “there was a profound connection between narrative, art,
\nmusic, and faith” (29).<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, when she moved from New
\nOrleans to Texas and then attended college, she observes that the
\n“church had become for me anti-art and anti-mind. No longer was there a
\nblending of the aesthetic and the religious as there had been
\nthroughout my childhood” (124). She left the church and that meant she
\nleft God for her God was the God of that church – the Roman Catholic
\nChurch. She quit and became an atheist for thirty-eight years.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
This book is the remarkable rediscovery of her faith.<\/p>\n

Sensory
\nfaith and sensory conversion stories are the province of artists who
\nwrite from the gut and by instinct. Anne Rice was such an author: her
\nvampire, sensual novels “where written,” she reveals, “by someone whose
\nauditory and visual experiences shaped the prose…. I am a terrible
\nreader. But my mind is filled with these auditory and visual lessons
\nand, powered by them, I can write about five times faster than I can
\nread” (144). She developed a style that could “make real for the reader
\nthe acoustic and iconic world in which I’d been formed as a child”
\n(144).<\/p>\n

Her conversion involved
\nthe sensory<\/span> and the aesthetic<\/span>. After she returned to New Orleans as an
\naccomplished a wildly wealthy novelist and after her faith began to
\nreawaken in her, she “continued to buy religious statues” (170) and a
\nbuilding or two that she filled with icons. Throughout her atheist
\ndays, Rice kept a graphic icon of St. Francis and Christ, an icon of
\nsuffering and compassion. Back in New Orleans her son and creation and
\nmusic and paintings continued to reveal to her that there was a God and
\nthat the incarnate Jesus Christ embodied – in a sensory and profoundly
\naesthetic sense – what her faith was once again becoming. After her
\nconversion she relearned to pray but to do so it had to become
\n“acoustic” – she had to hear the prayers (193).<\/p>\n

We’ll continue this review tomorrow.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Rice’s vampire novels have sold 100 million copies. She now writes, as she tells us so candidly in her memoir of conversion, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession , solely for God. Her story is an old genre: faith and then atheism and then rediscovery of faith. But, because her faith is also…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":297,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversion"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Christ-Haunted Vampire Novelist - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2008\/11\/the-christhaunted-vampire-nove.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Christ-Haunted Vampire Novelist - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anne Rice’s vampire novels have sold 100 million copies. 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