Anne Rice

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.

The following reviews are scheduled: Michael Standaert reviews "Wolf Totem," a novel by Jiang Rong. Tim Rutten reviews "Hollywood Crows," a novel by Joseph Wambaugh. Nicholas A. Basbanes reviews "The Library at Night" by Alberto Manguel Kevin Thomas reviews "Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, a Personal Biography" by Charlotte Chandler. Susan Salter Reynolds reviews "Water Cooler Diaries: Women Across America Share Their Day at Work" by Joni B. Cole and B.K. Rakhra.

Vampires are usually her passion, but Anne Rice is getting biblical in her next book, due out in November from publisher Random House. "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" will tell the story of Jesus' early years in his own words. Excerpts of a lengthy letter that will accompany advance review copies of the book this summer are published in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine. "For over 10 years I've wanted to do this book -- Jesus in his own words," Rice writes.

Novelist Anne Rice tends to take on subjects in a way that can raise eyebrows. Her 1976 novel, "Interview With the Vampire," for instance, launched a successful subgenre of vampire erotica. Under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, she penned a series of books on Sleeping Beauty, imbuing the narrative with a sexual desire unmentioned in the original fairy tale.

WHEN bestselling novelist Anne Rice was a good Catholic girl growing up in New Orleans, she dreamed of becoming a leader of the church. Instead, she abandoned Catholicism at 18 and stopped believing in God. She joined the Haight-Ashbury hippie milieu and evolved into the bestselling author who elevated the sexually ambiguous vampire Lestat to cult status. She wrote pornography under one pen name and erotica under another.

Anne Rice, the author who gave new life to the undead, lives in a house full of saints. Her library holds half a dozen 15-inch to 2 1/2-foot-high statues, including a porcelain Virgin Mary and Child dressed in embroidered velvet and stiff gold lace. Almost life-sized wooden figures of Mary and of St. Lucy, holding two eyeballs on a plate, stand serenely in a dining room decorated with antebellum murals of rural Italy. A smaller, arrow-pierced St.

Any day now, amid the Spanish moss and the Georgian manors of the Garden District, Anne Rice will descend the long stairs of her home, her shoes leaving behind dimples in the blood-red carpet, her graying bob reflecting one last time in the mirrors of her double parlor. The author is moving, and New Orleans, her hometown, is aghast.

Warner Bros. will produce a Broadway musical version of the Anne Rice vampire novels with the working title "The Vampire Lestat," the studio announced Tuesday. If the project comes to fruition in 2005 as planned, it will be the studio's first venture in producing theater, although Warners has previously invested in theater, said Gregg Maday, executive vice president of Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures. The "Vampire" talent includes names associated with rival Disney's theatrical projects.