Vampires, Anne Rice & Emerging Faith
This morning, as I drove back to Winnipeg from visiting family in Ontario, I listened to an interview with Bishop N.T. Wright and Anne Rice on my iPod. It was a great exchange, inspiring me to reread “Christ The Lord”. I was also reminded of something that happened years ago. When I was seventeen and attending my Discipleship Training School (DTS), I approached my leaders with an odd question. I genuinely felt like I was supposed to read “Interview With A Vampire” by Rice. A local Christian theatre company was doing a production of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, exploring the spiritual undercurrents in the story. After checking with my intentions, my school leader gave the thumbs up.
I was immediately swept up into a dark and sensual story, in which a vampire shares with a reporter (and the rest of us “mere mortals”) his tragic story. The novel tells a tale of good and evil, light and darkness, senuality and selfness. Rice manages to create a fascination and even sympathy for the vampire, with readers hoping for some kind of victory- a salvation, if you will. However, there is none to be had. Rice, reflecting her own journey in this story, had discovered no resolution herself, therefore could offer none for her character or, ultimately, her readers.
Perhaps this is why I was caught up in this dark story. As the main character struggled to overcome his own selfness, compromise and hungers, so to did my own hidden demons seem to come to life in identification. In the same way, though I was a genuine follower of Christ (in a missions school, nonetheless) the easy-believism and not-so-easy-legalism of the dominant Evangelical culture I had come out of had not provided a real hope, except perhaps by default, to mimic externally what I so longed for within.
The brilliance of Rice’s writing in this novel was in her capacity to paint vampires- the quintessential fallen humanity- as the paradox of beauty and brokenness. The vivid sensuality of the feedings at once repulsed you with the monstrosity that it was while also reflecting, if only in part, the redemptive intention of God in that very sensuality. It was not an evil so foreign to humanity that we could not identify, but a tainted and familiar twist on what is good and pure. I had not encountered such raw honesty before and I was captured by it.
In the end, I chose to not to read anymore of her Vampire Chronicles, feeling a deep sense of forboding, as though they stood on the brink of hopelessness. Knowing how vulnerable I was to such fatalism in that time, I put her books behind me. Lately, as I reconsider the archetype that the vampire represents to me, I have a deep appreciation for Rice. Now, having returned to Christ in a powerful way, she acknowledges how lost she was when writing the book. However, she is unapologetic, recognizing her a fair reflection of where she was at the time. Her honesty helped my own.
So often, Christians can miss the clear signs of a soul seeking God. Many dismissed Rice’s books as nothing more than unredemptive, demonic, dangerous. If we hope to build a Kingdom of authentic hope, peace and love, then we will need to be able to see with God’s eyes. In part, this will require of us a grace and a generousity that often seem too much, but it will also require us to real and authentic ourselves, acknowledging our weaknesses, doubts and fears so that we can identify and understand it in others.
