Anne Rice

Noted erotica enthusiast and enemy to anonymous online reviewers Anne Rice announced this week that she’s planning to bring back her best known character after more than a decade. The vampire Lestat de Lioncourt, Alison Flood writes for The Guardian, is due to come back in a new novel to be released this fall.

Rice debuted Lestat back in 1976 in her book The Interview with the Vampire, and the character is probably best known from the 1994 film adaptation by the same name, as played by Tom Cruise. She continued to write him into the subsequent installments of her Vampire Chronicles series, including The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, and 2003’s Blood Canticle—Rice’s most recent foray into writing about vampires.

Appearing on her son Christopher Rice’s online show The Dinner Party Show, the author revealed that the new book will be another episode in the Vampire Chronicles, and that “it is all about Lestat and all about the vampires, and what they are doing right now, how they are coming to terms with everything that’s happened to them, how Lestat is dealing with the demand from all side that he steps forward and becomes some sort of leader of the tribe.”

Expounding a bit on what it’s like to revisit a character after such a long break, Rice said:

I had to read all the Vampire Chronicles over again and I had to kind of … I don’t want to be irritating or pretentious talking about a character as if he’s a real human being, but I really had to wrestle Lestat to the ground, and beat him up, and say, “Look, you’ve got to talk to me, I’ve got to know what you’ve been doing.” Because I can’t really write novels about that character unless he wants to come through, and it really is like he’s a living breathing being somewhere, and suddenly he did, he came through, and he started to talk and I was taking the dictation, and everything went splendidly well and it was very exciting.

Rice has plans for a new series of vampire books, which will kick off in October with Prince Lestat; and per Vampire Bibliographica, she’s already started working on the next installment.