Author Anne Rice, best known for her cult-classic 1976 novel, Interview with the Vampire, died on December 11 in California from complications of a stroke. She was 80 years old. Grieving the loss of her five-year-old daughter, Michele, to leukemia in 1972, Rice began writing a short story following a journalist interviewing a vampire named Louis. Although relatively unknown until the success of Interview with the Vampire—which preceded six more books and a 1994 film starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt—Rice would go on to write 30 novels in her lifetime, lending a significant hand to the gothic genre and a revival of vampirism in literature. Despite the initial negative response from critics, the Vampire Chronicles franchise gained an accidental audience in the LGBTQ community, leading many queer fans to take to the internet to remember Rice and the personal impact her books had on their identities. Leaving behind an indisputable legacy, Anne Rice is survived by her son Christopher.
