I only heard the other day that Anne Rice legally pursued fanfic writers who used her characters, if I’m even getting that right. I’ve never read fanfic and don’t move in those communities so I didn’t know anything about it.

I was a teenager when I first picked up a ragged paperback copy of Interview With The Vampire, and it blew me away. Rice hadn’t published much else yet, and Interview hadn’t taken off yet, existing as it did for a few years as a sleeper.

The queer kid in me immediately caught her metaphors and understood a lot of what she was writing beneath the surface. It’s probably impossible for young adults today to fully understand the impact of her work on people then who had to live in the shadows. We were stunned that she seemed to be writing directly to us. When we learned she had a gay son, the connection seemed all the more powerful.

For many years I devoured everything she wrote. Eventually, I got bored, understanding she was never going to be able to meet the expectations she set with Interview. And with the world changing, I guess I stopped needing her so much.

But I’ll never forgot the joy her first novels brought me, and I know many queer people my age and even somewhat younger feel the same way. And that’s without even beginning to acknowledge the huge impact she had on gothic horror writing, a genre that’s never appealed to me anyway. That’s not why I read Rice. I loved her for many other reasons, and I’m willing to forgive much because of that.