We welcome back Anne Rice to Live Talks Los Angeles for another conversation with her son, Christopher Rice.  See the video from when they last appeared in January, 2011.

Anne Rice was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She holds a Master of Arts Degree in English and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science.  She is the author of 32 books, including The Wolves of Midwinter and The Wolf Gift. Her first novel, Interview with the Vampire, was published in 1976 and has gone on to become one of the best-selling novels of all time. She continued her saga of the Vampire Lestat in a series of books, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles, which have had both great mainstream and cult followings and are widely assigned in high school and collegiate English and philosophy classes. Anne Rice is also the author of The Witching Hour, Servant of the Bones, Merrick, Blackwood Farm,Blood Canticle, The Feast of All Saints, and Cry to Heaven, as well as Of Love and Evil and Angel Time, the Songs of the Seraphim series; a memoir, Called Out of Darkness; and the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, depicting the life of Jesus Christ, based on the Gospels and the most respected New Testament scholarship.  Anne Rice lives in Palm Desert, California.

In Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles, Rice once again summons up the irresistible spirit-world of the oldest and most powerful forces of the night, invisible beings unleashed on an unsuspecting world able to take blood from humans, in a long-awaited return to the extraordinary world of the Vampire Chronicles, a long-awaited novel that picks up where The Vampire Lestat left off more than a quarter of a century ago to create an extraordinary new world of spirits and forces-the characters, legend, and lore of all the Vampire Chronicles.

The novel opens with the vampire world in crisis…vampires have been proliferating out of control; burnings have commenced all over the world, huge massacres similar to those carried out by Akasha in The Queen of the Damned…Old vampires, roused from slumber in the earth are doing the bidding of a Voice commanding that they indiscriminately burn vampire-mavericks in cities from Paris and Mumbai to Hong Kong, Kyoto, and San Francisco.

As the novel moves from present-day New York and the West Coast to ancient Egypt, fourth century Carthage, 14th-century Rome, the Venice of the Renaissance, the worlds and beings of all the Vampire Chronicles-Louis de Pointe du Lac; the eternally young Armand, whose face is that of a Boticelli angel; Mekare and Maharet, Pandora and Flavius; David Talbot, vampire and ultimate fixer from the secret Talamasca; and Marius, the true Child of the Millennia; along with all the other new seductive, supernatural creatures-come together in this large, luxuriant, fiercely ambitious novel to ultimately rise up and seek out who-or what-the Voice is, and to discover the secret of what it desires and why… And, at the book’s center, the seemingly absent, curiously missing hero-wanderer, the dazzling, dangerous rebel-outlaw-the great hope of the Undead, the dazzling Prince Lestat…

Christopher Rice published his bestselling debut novel, A Density of Souls, when he was twenty-two. By thirty, Rice had published four New York Times bestsellers, received a Lambda Literary Award, and been declared one of People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive.” His noir thriller Light Before Day was hailed as a “book of the year” by bestselling author Lee Child. His most recent book, The Heavens Rise, was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.

His new novel, The Vines, is a supernatural thriller set in the familiar gothic playground of his hometown New Orleans.  In The Vines, Rice is at his best in a harrowing page-turner that evokes the bloody and horrifying past of a beautifully restored plantation estate with a dark history.  Its residents have always suspected something malevolent haunts the old home, and after the actions of a wealthy heiress awaken a sinister power beneath its soil, the survivors soon realize that realize that the vengeance enacted by this otherworldly force comes at a terrible price.

He has published short fiction in the anthologies Thriller and Los Angeles Noir. His writing has been featured in the Advocate, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and on Salon.com. With his friend and cohost Eric Shaw Quinn, Rice recently launched his own internet radio broadcast, The Dinner Party Show (TheDinnerPartyshow.com).