Anne Rice's Old Black Magic Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles take a whole new twist in Merrick, the story of the vampires' encounter with a mysterious and sensuous offspring of the Mayfair Witches whose voodoo has powers the Fang Gang never dreamed of. In this exclusive interview with Amazon.com's Tim Appelo, Anne Rice discusses the meaning of magic, the sex drives of vampires, and how she creates and relates to her celebrated characters. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Amazon.com: What is the difference between a vampire and a witch? Anne Rice: A witch is a person who can manipulate spirits. A vampire is a totally different creature who has to be made by another vampire, and has a completely different set of rules: he can't move around in the day, he can be killed by the sunlight or by fire. In this novel I decided to bring Merrick Mayfair, a true sorceress or witch, in contact with the vampires. Vampires are earthbound, and magic can go beyond the earthbound lair and bring spirits down. Even for a vampire, magic can be a very frightening thing. Amazon.com: Merrick calls upon lost souls. Rice: The "lonely souls." That's an old, old phrase mentioned over and over in books on magic: people would call on a lonely soul who was hovering around the graveyard, who hadn't passed on, onto the light or the other world, still clinging to our world. Amazon.com: But you never know just which soul will answer your call. Rice: That's right. That's part of the theme of the book--that you don't know who you're gonna get, and you have to remember that. Even with Merrick, you don't know until the last few pages. Merrick is not an ordinary human being. Amazon.com: She's not even an ordinary Mayfair Witch. Rice: Oh, no. The Mayfair Witches mainly dealt with one particular spirit, Lasher. Merrick can really work voodoo. Amazon.com: She has black magic--and unlike the other Mayfair Witches, she's an octoroon, part black. Have you written about that before? Rice: Yeah, the second novel I published, The Feast of All Saints, was all about the free people of color, this huge middle class that lived free in New Orleans before the Civil War. Merrick is their descendant. Amazon.com: This book is contiguous with so many of your previous stories. And you broke two promises with it: never to write about Lestat again, and never to write another witch book. Rice: I can't stop weaving the stories together. Lestat is just a character that I can't put aside. I can't. Amazon.com: What can we tell rabid Lestat fans about what happens in Merrick? Rice: He's been sleeping on the floor of the chapel at St. Elizabeth's for a long time. Something happened in this book that was sufficient to wake him up. Amazon.com: The vampire David Talbot asks Merrick to summon the spirit of the dead child vampire Claudia, because the vampire Louis is obsessed with her. Rice: Claudia haunts Louis, and obviously the character haunts me. Amazon.com: The question of identity and deep, uncanny influences of one character over another echo through the book. Even the narrator, Talbot, is not occupying his original body--he's in the one he acquired in the novel The Tale of the Body Thief. He's influenced by the prior life of that body, and also by Merrick. She can cast spells on men to make them fancy her. Rice: Yeah. And David is a different vampire from the rest because he did live so long in a mortal body. He was in his 70s when he went into the mortal body, so he has more erotic feelings for mortals. The others were so young, like Lestat and Louis, their feelings are directly connected with the drinking of the blood--erotic to them. But David is capable of being attracted to Merrick in a much more purely male-female, fiery attraction. Amazon.com: Lestat and Louis would not kiss Merrick's breasts with a conventional male motive, as Talbot does. Rice: No, they wouldn't! But David is tormented because he was a man longer. That was something I just came upon as I was writing. That's my method, to trust my instincts, and when I discover something like that to go with it. Yes, of course David would feel strongly towards her, because he has such intense memories of contact with women, and with men. David's a bisexual, a more eroticized vampire. Amazon.com: It seems these books come out of a place of ravishment of the imagination. You plunge into them, you're taking a journey along with the reader. Rice: That's extremely accurate. I wrote Merrick in two months, in long sessions at the computer, principally on Saturday and Sunday. I would go to Mass and Communion, come back, and work all day on Merrick. It was very intense. Amazon.com: One of the characters has a near-death experience. You recently had a near-death experience. Did you learn anything useful? Rice: I don't remember a thing about the day I almost died. I went into a diabetic coma. My heart had ceased to beat. It was wobbling and I was about to go into cardiac arrest. Fifteen or 20 minutes more and I might've died. Amazon.com: But did it inform this novel? Rice: Writing the novel helped get me out of a very deep depression that followed the experience. I think that's why this novel is more fun than some of the others. I wasn't ready to fish the tragic waters, as Hemingway would put it. That came later, in a novel called Blood and Gold, out in 2001. Amazon.com: Merrick drinks a lot. I interviewed Stephen King, and read his memoir On Writing about writing, drinking, and almost dying. He says drinking influenced his books a lot: the horrors in Misery and The Shining symbolized his addiction. Rice: I'll have to read On Writing. I don't remember anything about him having a problem, but I certainly remember that in The Shining he seemed to understand things about a person giving up drinking. I really am a fan of Stephen King. I haven't been able to read fast enough to keep up with him, but I thought the early books were wonderful, and I learned from him. Firestarter really teaches you how to move a story. Amazon.com: Some of your own books are probably influenced by your mother's gift of storytelling and curse of alcoholism. Rice: I'm not sure. Everything that happens to you influences you, and I did go through a long period where I was a heavy drinker, and something of an episodic drinker. But Merrick is not autobiographical. What I was driving at was the fact that this intense woman would need times to get away, to just escape, and she would drink in this episodic fashion, get drunk and shut everybody out. As much as I loved drinking when I did it, I don't think I ever drank really to pass out. I drank to get drunk and enjoyed everything, with friends. I didn't drink the way Merrick does. That was something that came up in the evolution of her character. Spitting the rum through her teeth and making the rum flare up in the candlelight--that's a real voodoo thing. I read that in a description of a voodoo ceremony in Robert Tallant's wonderful Voodoo in New Orleans. Amazon.com: Is there anything else you're reading that you'd recommend to fans? Rice: The book by John Edward, the medium on the Sci-Fi Channel--he's one of the most powerful mediums I've ever seen on television. One Last Time describes his thoughts about how he got the power to hear the voices of the dead. He's very, very impressive.