53. Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Anne Rice

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53. Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Anne Rice

I’ve tried to read Interview With a Vampire twice, once in high school (to be cool) and once about 4 years ago (to be well read), and I couldn’t get into it either time. This was mainly because Anne Rice can describe something to death. It had nothing to do with homoerotic, andro-y vamps and their glorious hair. It was more to do with she could write a book just describing Lestat’s hair or the architecture of a building. And while I love hair and architecture, I’ve had plenty of art history classes, thank you, and I’m not interested in books that go into huge amounts of detail that seem to slow the plot. I recognize that some people love that stuff, and that’s awesome for them, but for me… just get on with the story!

First and foremost, I was not raised Catholic and am currently non-Catholic, and I think that if I had been raised Catholic this book may have meant more to me. If you are Catholic or were raised Catholic I would recommend this book to you because I think you’d be surprised at how much you probably have in common with Anne Rice.

This nonfiction book of hers on her conversion back to Christianity started out very descriptive of her childhood. She goes on to describe everything. Her church, the statues in the church, the stations of the cross in her church…it went on and on. And look, I love memoirs. I do. It’s probably the grenre I read the most. So I get that memoirs are going to be self-aborbed, that that’s even kind of the point. But the first 100 pages where she talks about her childhood were ridiculously described to death, and many parts of it were redundant. If she could’ve shortened the first part to 50 – 60 pages it would have been great.

Another annoying thing about this book is the redundancy. She would say something and then say something like, “To repeat:….” and then say the same thing again. This really only works when one is giving a speech. In the written word it’s a bit pointless. I imagine then that the audiobook would be a pretty good listen.

The third thing I found annoying was that several times she’d say something like, “And now I’ll tell you about This Important Thing. But before I tell you about This Important Thing, first let me tell you about This.” This seemed a bit bush league. She did it more than once. It was like reading a first draft or something, where the ideas are all laid out but not quite in the right order yet, and it’s good that it’s all written down, but maybe you should go back and move some paragraphs around and do some general tweaking.

Now, with all my negative pet peeves out of the way, I’ve got to say that this was a good book. Well, after the first part it becomes a good book. Her break from the church was really interesting because it actually wasn’t that interesting at all. I was expecting some kind of huge dramatic thing to have happened to make her turn away from the church, but it was so subtle and nearly boring that to me, that was an even scarier thing to think about.

One thing I must praise Mrs. Rice on is her honesty. And she should be commended on her bravery. I mean, let’s say you’ve been an atheist for 30 years and you’ve been writing books about gay vampires and demons (which I imagine are not being read by the christian right) and then you convert back to Catholicism and start writing books about Jesus. Not only have you pissed of your loyal like-minded readers, but now you’ve many judging judgehole Christians to contend with who are quite possibly thinking, “Just what does Anne “queer vampire fiction” Rice know about Jesus anyway?”

Turns out, she knows quite a lot.

The second half of this book is interesting, enjoyable, thought-provoking, and I’m very glad she wrote this book.

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