Anne Rice was an American writer known for her gothic fiction and erotic literature.

Vampirism as a metaphor for sex

I only read one of her books, her debut Interview with a Vampire (1976), probably when I traveled Indonesia or when I lived in China, I cannot remember.

It was the first vampire story that I read. Later I became interested in lesbian vampires. When I researched exploitation films I came to realize that female vampires preying on other vampires is a metaphor for lesbianism. Five minutes later I came to realize that that vampirism is a metaphor for sex tout court.

The road to sadomasochism …

And then obviously, the road from vampirism and sex to sadomasochism is short.

And by googling Anne Rice + sadomasochism, I stumbled upon the book Anne Rice Reader in which the interviewer asks:

In your novel Exit to Eden you talk about there being a racial memory of …

And her answer is:

“If we look for a cause, we would have to think about something like racial memory – something encoded in the genes, some way in which after thousands of years, we’ve turned experiences of violence and violation into something erotic.”

And then, googling again for Anne Rice and “racial memory” I land on my own site where I’ve started to wikify  the book The Biology of Horror.

Racial memory is a sort of vestigial memory a cell memory that contains all of the experiences of our species.

Lateral connections

In that same book The Biology of Horror there are (and I will not pursue the racial memory strain) some beautiful quotations by Rice:

A person unwilling to die is described as “the vampire of time which has sucked on it for years on end”.

And the book also mentions Anne Rice’s appreciation for a line of poetry by Yeats. She cites “I must lie down where all ladders start, / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” from “The Circus Animals Desertion”.

She seemed very intelligent and reminds me in some ways of Stephen King.