Anne Rice is now extolling Jesus Christ, not vampires

It’s Halloween, and Anne Rice has a new book -- a memoir in fact -- that’s climbing bestseller lists. Everything is normal, then.

Normal if it were 1994 -- the height of Rice’s mega-selling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic pulp.

For those who haven’t been paying attention lately to vampire lit, America’s most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn’t live in New Orleans anymore -- and hasn’t since before Hurricane Katrina hit -- and she’s riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit.

Her memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,� is the latest piece of evidence that Rice is reinventing herself in an attempt to build a reputation as a serious Christian writer.

In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn’t disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches -- with a batch of S&M erotica thrown in -- after the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, “Interview With the Vampire.�

But she’s clearly moved on.

In a telephone interview from her mountain home in Rancho Mirage, Rice laid out her goal:

“To be able to take the tools, the apprenticeship, whatever I learned from being a vampire writer, or whatever I was -- to be able to take those tools now and put them in the service of God is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful opportunity,� she said. “And I hope I can redeem myself in that way. I hope that the Lord will accept the books I am writing now.�

The memoir follows the release of two books in a planned four-part, first-person chronicle of the life of Jesus.

And in this 245-page tome, Rice presents her former life as vampire writer as that of a soul-searching wanderer in the deserts of atheism; as someone akin to her most famous literary creations -- Lestat, her “dark search engine�; Louis the aristocrat-turned-vampire; and Egyptian Queen Akasha, “the mother of all vampires.�

“I do think that those dark books were always talking about religion in their own way. They were talking about the grief for a lost faith,� she said.

In 2002, Rice broke away completely from atheism -- nearly four decades after she gave up her Roman Catholic faith as the 1960s started.

Always over-the-top and beyond the rational, she writes that her return of faith was preceded by a series of epiphanies -- many while on travels to Europe’s cathedrals, Israel and Brazil.

In a sense, the memoir also is a confessional about her struggle as a writer to be a reader, a thinker and an author with a distinct literary style. Her stories often are reveries with no end in sight -- and all too often ugly with pedantic unwinding, numbing in detail and overly simplistic, a pastiche of cliches.

Rice isn’t out to impress the critics, though.

“My objective is simple: It’s to write books about our Lord living on Earth that make him real to people who don’t believe in him; or people who have never really tried to believe in him,� she said.

She pressed the point: “I mean, I’ve made vampires believable to grown women. Now, if I can do that, I can make our Lord Jesus Christ believable to people who’ve never believed in him. I hope and pray.�

Burdeau is a writer for the Associated Press.