Ep. 64 – LESTAT LIVES! – ANNE RICE
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Anne Rice reveals that her next novel will feature the return of her beloved hero, the vampire Lestat. When it releases this October, PRINCE LESTAT will be the first new chapter in her bestselling series, The Vampire Chronicles, since 2003. With hosts Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn, Anne gives some story hints (but no spoilers!) and responds to the overwhelming excitement among her many fans who listened to the show live and posted questions for her on The Dinner Party Show’s Facebook page.
You have to tell yourself, stop being a perfectionist. Stop editing and re-editing what you just did. Let it start rolling for you. You can go back later and re-read the beginning. Stop just running to the laboratory and washing your hands, trying to get them clean, trying to get everything perfect. Just calm down and keep going.
ANNE RICE
The Dinner Party Show Podcast — Ep. 64: Anne Rice Interview Transcript
{This transcript is the Anne Rice interview portion of Episode 64}
{This transcript is provided as a courtesy and was transcribed as best as possible. Any errors or omissions in the transcript are unintentional. The recorded audio file of the podcast episode is considered the master of what was said.}
Christopher Rice:
Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.
Christopher Rice:
And I’m sorry, who are you, ma’am?
Anne Rice:
My name’s Anne Rice. I’m a writer.
Christopher Rice:
Oh, your publicist called a few hours ago and was like, “Will you take this client, she’s in town.”
Anne Rice:
Thank you so much for squeezing me in.
Christopher Rice:
It’s our pleasure.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We haven’t talked about anything on the show except this for about a month and a half now.
Anne Rice:
Yeah, I’m delighted.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We are pretty delighted too.
Christopher Rice:
So we’re going to make people wait about two hours for the big announcement.
Anne Rice:
No, we’re not. I can’t wait that long.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
RuPaul, we took our lead from RuPaul. We’re going to just wait and wait. We’re going to drag it out as long as possible.
Christopher Rice:
Okay. So you want to get right in or are we going to do a drum roll or are we going to-
Anne Rice:
I’m happy to get right in.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Is everybody ready?
Anne Rice:
I’m at last able to announce my up and coming new novel. The title is Prince Lestat, and it is a big Vampire Chronicle and it’s all about Lestat and all about the vampires and what they’re doing right now, how they’re coming to terms with everything that’s happening to them and how Lestat is dealing with the demand from all sides that he step forward and become some sort of leader of the tribe.
Christopher Rice:
Mom, you’re going to have to go… We played a big fanfare. You weren’t looking at my hand signals, so you’re going to have to say all of that over again.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
No, you don’t. You don’t have to say any of it over again. Everybody was listening.
Anne Rice:
Okay.
Christopher Rice:
No, but it’s a true sequel to The Queen of the Damned. That’s how you described it to me.
Anne Rice:
Well, it’s a sequel to the first four books. Actually, it’s a sequel to, I would say, everything up through Memnoch the Devil. It’s a sequel to the first five Vampire Chronicles. After that, The Vampire Chronicles are kind of memoir books and backstory and other experiments and so forth, but this is really the follow-up to all of that. Yes. It’s the sequel to The Queen of the Damned.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Wow.
Christopher Rice:
Right.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. And I’m very relieved finally to be able to talk about it because I actually finished it last summer. I finished it, I think in August, and made some final revisions around Thanksgiving. But it’s been in ever since. But the publisher really didn’t want me to talk about it yet, and I’ve been having a terrible time not talking about it.
Christopher Rice:
Hey, you and me both. You and all of us. Eric and I have both-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It’s been quite a secret to keep.
Christopher Rice:
… read this novel. We’ve both read the novel, and we have not said a word on any episode of The Dinner Party Show.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I wouldn’t even tell my parents. They called me about my birthday and I wouldn’t tell them what the announcement was. It’s been a big secret.
Christopher Rice:
I was openly hostile with friends of mine who tried to get me to tell, good friends of mine. I ruined friendships over this book, Mom, in this embargo.
Anne Rice:
I’m so sorry.
Christopher Rice:
It’s ruined my life.
Anne Rice:
I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell everybody the minute I finished it. In fact, I did go on Facebook and say, “I’ve just finished my new novel.” I just didn’t say what it was about, which, and so forth. But I’m very happy to announce it because it took me a very long time to write this. I had to read all The Vampire Chronicles over again. And I had to, I don’t want to be irritating or how shall I put it, pretentious talking about a character as though he’s a living being. But I really had to wrestle Lestat to the ground and beat him up and say, “Look, you got to talk to me. I want to know what you’ve been doing.” Because I can’t really write novels about that character unless he wants to come through. And it really is like he’s a living, breathing, being somewhere. And suddenly he did. He came through and he started to talk and I was taking the dictation and everything went splendidly well, and it was very exciting.
Christopher Rice:
What made him come back through? Was it the werewolves that brought him back or what opened the door again?
Anne Rice:
I’m not sure.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Was everybody asking you to write another Lestat book?
Christopher Rice:
Was it Eric never leaving you alone about writing about Lestat again?
Anne Rice:
I’m not sure it was everybody asking, because I truly felt that I couldn’t. And I was telling them sincerely, “No, that will never happen. That’s just not going to happen.” And I meant it. I didn’t think that it would. I’m not sure what really did it. Let’s just say I finally had a novel to write. I had a story to tell with him, and I had his voice again with me, and it happened. I couldn’t make that happen. I couldn’t force that. I couldn’t just pull that out of a hat like a rabbit. It had to happen. And I do think going back and reading all the books, feeling I had a lot more to say, a lot more, getting really excited, what if, what if, what if, as I read. That made a big deal of difference. And also feeling I knew him again. He was talking to me and I knew where he was.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Well, all of them. I mean it does a wonderful, I’m one of the lucky people who’s actually gotten to read it already, and it does a great job of kind of recapping where everyone is across spanning times and eons.
Anne Rice:
That was a lot of fun. And I did, there were a lot of false starts and I wrote a lot of material that never made it into the novel. The characters made it into the novel and their stories made it in. But lots of stories, incidents, little vignettes, whatever about those characters never made it in. They may make it into a second one.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I was going to say, you’ll just have to write 10 or 12 more books about these people.
Anne Rice:
I’m absolutely delighted to do that. I feel like this is-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I’d be delighted to read them.
Anne Rice:
This is novel one of a new incarnation of The Vampire Chronicles.
Christopher Rice:
So the Facebook page has literally gone insane. Shea Butters says it’s anarchy and chaos on the Facebook page, we’re going to ask everybody to use the #princelestat because that is the title of the new novel, Prince Lestat. Many of you used the #annericereveal all week long, and we thank you for that, but we want to get that name out there. So the industry gossip behind this is that last week this was announced to the Random House Sales Force. And amazingly they kept it a secret. We begged them to keep it a secret-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Way to go guys, we’re very impressed. And girls too,
Christopher Rice:
They met at their sales conference, somewhere in New York, I think. I don’t know.
Anne Rice:
I don’t know where they were, yeah.
Christopher Rice:
But they were all in one place, which is what matters to me.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Which means Vicky probably just locked the door and turned off their cell phones.
Christopher Rice:
Right, exactly.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
There’s, “Let us out.”
Christopher Rice:
And we were so nervous. We were like, will they keep it a secret? Because they all love to hop right on Twitter when the new books are all announced. And they were shown a short film showing a sequence of your book covers from over the years starting in 1975.
Anne Rice:
Yes, because I’ve been with Knopf for, since 1976. I’ve been with Vicky Wilson since 1974, when she came into my life and became my editor and mentor and friend. And this is kind of a remarkable story in itself. I don’t think there are very many editors and authors in New York today who’ve been together 40 years.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It’s like a business partnership. It’s like a long-standing partnership.
Anne Rice:
It’s a love affair. It’s a love affair. I mean, it really is. I think Vicky was about 25 when we met.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
You couldn’t pick better. I love Vicky.
Christopher Rice:
Yeah, she’s great. She’s a character. But the punchline to that story is that after the book was announced, the entire sales force gave it a standing ovation.
Anne Rice:
They did. They did. And that was wonderful news. Vicky immediately emailed me and told me standing ovation, and I talked to Paul Bogaards, my really good friend at Knopf who does publicity for authors and has for years, and he’s told me about the standing ovation. So we were very happy about that.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
So everyone’s so excited about this book. It’s why we’ve been so excited to be here when you make the big announcement.
Anne Rice:
I mean, they could have said, “What the hell, who is she?” or “Who’s that?”
Christopher Rice:
Like I did when you came into the studio tonight. Anne who? Anne of Green Gables? I don’t like Green Gables.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
No. Everybody knows who you are.
Christopher Rice:
Everybody knows and everybody knows who he is. I think you’ve covered this a little bit already, but they’re all back. I don’t think it’s too spoilery to say that in the book, that most of them are coming back in this book.
Anne Rice:
Just about everybody. But there’s some things I didn’t do. I mean, I could not bring absolutely every single person back, and there were just some things I chose to do rather than others. And there’s something else I wanted to say. I didn’t feel I could write this book until I had a second act kind of for the Talamasca. And there is a lot about the Talamasca in this-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
They’re an important part of the Chronicles.
Anne Rice:
… in this book, a lot about who founded it.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Really interesting. Wonderful new mythology.
Anne Rice:
Anybody who has never heard that before is, this is an organization of scholars that goes back over a thousand years. And this organization has been studying the vampires. And they pop up, not only in The Vampire Chronicles, but in my Mayfair Witch books, too. They study witches, vampires, ghosts and so forth. And they’re very big in this book. And there’s a lot more to write about them and what they’re doing in the next book.
Christopher Rice:
I realized-
Anne Rice:
Prince Lestat 2.
Christopher Rice:
I knew you were going that way because, which we’ve talked about on the show, I was writing a script for one of the earlier vampire books and I posited an origin story for the Talamasca. And you went, “Christopher, that’s not where they came from.” And I went, “Well, you have never said where they came from.” And you said, “I will.”
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Just be patient. So yeah, no, exciting new, whole new areas of the mythology opening up in there.
Anne Rice:
I had so much fun writing it. I mean, I really did.
Christopher Rice:
And we had so much fun reading it.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Absolutely.
Christopher Rice:
Sprawling, juicy, delicious Game of Thrones style, Anne Rice style, multiple points of view, multiple countries. It’s like classic Anne Rice stuff.
Anne Rice:
Well, thank you. You’re being very generous, both of you.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It’s the truth. It is a spectacular sort of revisiting of all of these favorites. I won’t say relaunch because the, it’s really been out there selling the whole time. But-
Anne Rice:
Yeah, to me it’s like a new incarnation.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
An exciting new chapter.
Anne Rice:
A new chapter. And for Lestat, personally, it’s a whole new existence for him.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
My favorite.
Anne Rice:
I mean the title, Prince Lestat has a lot of meaning in the book. And I also should say right now, that it will be published October 28th.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
October 28th.
Anne Rice:
I did confirm that today-
Christopher Rice:
In Time for the Vampire Lestat Ball in-
Anne Rice:
Absolutely.
Christopher Rice:
… in New Orleans. And I believe we have Sue Quiroz who runs the ball on the Facebook page tonight. And I told her that we were going to have a, I couldn’t tell her what it was. About three o’clock today, I wanted to spill the beans and give her a hint because I knew she would come apart.
Anne Rice:
Sue has been so patient, and she’s been holding up the ball. I mean, she’s been holding up the publicity on the ball for me, waiting for this. I asked her to wait and I hope she will name it the Prince Lestat Ball.
Christopher Rice:
Yes.
Anne Rice:
Or something to do with Lestat Returns and-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
The Incarnation Ball or something.
Anne Rice:
And I will be at that ball in New Orleans. It will be on Halloween night itself. And I hope both of you will be with me.
Christopher Rice:
We will be there.
Anne Rice:
Me, Eric, and Christopher.
Christopher Rice:
Eric will be dressed as Eric, and I will be dressed as something shirtless and inappropriate.
Anne Rice:
Yes, yes.
Christopher Rice:
No, I actually have my costume already picked out. So we have a lot of people on the page. We’re going to get to their questions as the show goes on this evening. They want to know which vampires will be reappearing by name.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And we should say that the advanced sales start on the 16th. Next Sunday the links will actually-
Anne Rice:
Yes, next Sunday.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We’ll promote those here. But also with your page-
Anne Rice:
They’ll go up on Amazon. The cover art will go up and the description of the book and people will be able to order it if they want on Amazon and probably Barnes and Noble and other sites, as well. They were going to do it tonight, but they didn’t want to make a mistake and-
Christopher Rice:
They didn’t want to spoil our surprise.
Anne Rice:
They were very nice.
Christopher Rice:
Your publisher has been so nice to The Dinner Party Show. And everyone can rest assured, Mom, if we hadn’t liked the book, we wouldn’t have had you on to talk about it tonight. So you always know you get the truth from me.
Anne Rice:
Oh, yeah. We live with those realities. Like a call would’ve come from LA saying, “Well, Mom, it’s nice that you did this, but I don’t think we really should announce it too early. I think maybe, there are not too many people really that…” Whatever.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I’m going to say everyone gets served. We mean it.
Christopher Rice:
I’m going to send you these books to read, Mom. They’re called The Twilight Saga. I don’t know, I just feel like maybe so they could give you a new direction, like a sort of teenagers in the woods direction.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
No. We are actually delighted to read about some real vampires who actually do vampire stuff and don’t just sparkle.
Anne Rice:
I don’t think there’s a single character in this book who goes to high school. I don’t think, unless I missed something.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Well, there’s actually, I think-
Anne Rice:
Actually, there is somebody going to college-
Christopher Rice:
There is one.
Anne Rice:
There is someone going, I mean, she’s going to Stanford, but she does go to high school.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
She gets to Stanford pretty quickly.
Anne Rice:
Yes, she does.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
So yeah, we move on.
Christopher Rice:
Nothing less than the Ivy League for Anne Rice’s vampire.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We don’t dwell on Stanford, on high school, but it does happen little bit.
Anne Rice:
Well guys, thank you for inviting me to do this, because this is so much fun rather than just sitting at home and-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Tweeting it.
Anne Rice:
… talking about it, right, that I get to come here and sort of celebrate the whole thing.
Christopher Rice:
Well, we’re going to take a short break and allow Shea Butters our manservant. And we want to remind people, if you’re listening to the show live through one of our apps or on your computer, you can interact with us via our Facebook page for The Dinner Party Show. Just look for The Dinner Party Show on Facebook. Shea Butters, our moderator, is refining your questions and comments and shooting them to us here in the studio. And we’re going to take a short break to hear from one of Mom’s favorite special correspondents Jordan Ampersand, with a very special message.
Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.
Christopher Rice:
And my mother, Anne Rice, our guest this evening has just announced that her next book will in fact be about the Loch Ness Monster, or not Report Be Damned, a sensitive, soulful lochnessee.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Right?
Christopher Rice:
No, the new book is called Prince Lestat.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
So guess who’s in it?
Christopher Rice:
Lestat is actually not in it. She also announced that earlier. No, it isn’t-
Anne Rice:
He’s definitely in it.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
All about Lestat.
Christopher Rice:
October 28th. You will also be returning to the Vampire Lestat Ball in New Orleans.
Anne Rice:
I will, yeah.
Christopher Rice:
We have a question from Sue Quiroz. She wants to know if she can call it the Lestat Coronation Ball.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Oh, that’s brilliant.
Anne Rice:
That’s brilliant.
Christopher Rice:
And then she will have his coronation.
Anne Rice:
That is brilliant. That is absolutely wonderful. Sue, that is great. That is just great. But will there really be a coronation ceremony? And can Christopher put on a blonde wing and-
Christopher Rice:
Whoa, whoa, whoa, lady. Whoa. I’m committed to the brand, but let’s not go crazy. This hair hasn’t been blonde for years.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. But we’ll get you a beautiful wig.
Christopher Rice:
I’m almost 40. I’m turning 36 this week. I can’t, I’m too old to play Lestat, really.
Anne Rice:
He’s 250 years old. Don’t worry about it.
Christopher Rice:
He hasn’t aged a day since he was turned into a vampire.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
OK so which is it, Christopher?
Anne Rice:
Whatever Sue Q wants, whatever Sue Q wants, we’ll do it.
Christopher Rice:
We’ll do it, yeah.
Anne Rice:
We’ll do a coronation at the ball. Absolutely.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
A coronation sounds great. We will have this, his coronation.
Anne Rice:
But I think if you are called, you have to serve. You know, you have to serve. Now let’s-
Christopher Rice:
Story of my life.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
The vampire draft.
Anne Rice:
Let me tell you a story about how things could be worse.
Christopher Rice:
Okay, I’m ready.
Anne Rice:
Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy, and her poor little son got photographed, his as Little Lord Fauntleroy, and he never lived it down.
Christopher Rice:
I know, right. And he looked like me. He was a little, he had blonde. Well, I used to have blonde hair, but he did. He had a blonde pageboy cut. And I remember his illustrated face was on the cover.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Was he seven and a half feet tall?
Christopher Rice:
No, am I seven and a half feet tall? I’ll take it. I’ll just take it.
Anne Rice:
No, I just have to read that-
Christopher Rice:
I’ll be seven and a half feet tall.
Anne Rice:
… the other night. But I’m just so happy that we can talk about the book at length.
Christopher Rice:
Finally.
Anne Rice:
I am, and I should say, the only books I didn’t hook into with this were the hybrid books, Merrick, Blackwood Farm, and Blood Canticle. And I didn’t try to hook into those books, and some of those Mayfair characters, because I have never been sure that those books really worked for me. They were very successful for a lot of people.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And great fun.
Anne Rice:
And they were very much not successful for some other people. But myself, I wasn’t that comfortable with mixing the Mayfair Witches and the Vampires. So I didn’t try to hook into some of the characters in those books. But other than that, I hope this gives a really comprehensive picture of where all the main characters of the-
Christopher Rice:
It’s all of them, all of them.
Anne Rice:
… and what they’ve been doing and what’s happened to them and how they come together at this moment in time.
Christopher Rice:
But I mean, that’s really the question we’re getting over and over again on the page is which vampires are coming back. And the answer that I have from having read the books is all of them, pretty much.
Anne Rice:
Yes. Except I would say whoever was in those hybrid books, specifically. I just didn’t want to go there. And that was a creative choice and an aesthetic choice and an emotional choice.
Christopher Rice:
Dan Doremus, I hope I pronounced your last name correctly, would like to know if Lestat will have a podcast.
Anne Rice:
A podcast?
Christopher Rice:
A podcast. There is a vampire radio show in the book.
Anne Rice:
There is a radio show.
Christopher Rice:
I wonder where she got that idea.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
No telling.
Christopher Rice:
That Anne Rice, I swear to God.
Anne Rice:
I know, isn’t that, wow. No, that’s a very interesting question. I would say, yeah, he is going to have podcasts. I mean that’s part of the book, media, radio, communications is part of the book-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It is very updated.
Anne Rice:
We don’t want to tell too much.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Yeah, no, no,
Christopher Rice:
But I don’t think that’s telling too much. But I enjoyed that part, in the early part of the book the most, updating how vampires are… Well, we have another question. Courtney Bentley would like to know how Lestat’s going to handle a smartphone, and that is dealt with in this book, as well.
Anne Rice:
Oh, he, as clueless as I am when he comes to tech and he explains that his preternatural intelligence works beautifully to learn everything about an iPhone and then he forgets it within days, or nights. And he can’t remember how to phone anybody,
Eric Shaw Quinn:
But his hair grows back beautifully.
Anne Rice:
Oh yes. Yeah. I finally have come to terms with that, that vampire intelligence is an enhancement of human intelligence. And if you don’t have an aptitude for science, you’re not going to get it as a vampire.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Well, it seems like even as a human being after a certain point in time, there’s some technology that’s just never going to be available to you, right. People a few years older than me couldn’t ever get the flashing 12 to go away from their VHS. And people my age can’t quite do the things, my nephew is like, does amazing stuff with computers that I’m like, “Really? You’re 12. How is that even possible?”
Anne Rice:
I know. Everybody should have a 12-year-old to help them with everything.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It’s a generational thing. But because vampire span so many generations, I really, it was a really interesting choice in the book to, because it is very much, it happens like today and the whole book is set and-
Anne Rice:
There’s a lot about technology.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
… you very much address yourself to the current, where we are communication-wise in terms of all sorts of current electronics and media and everything else, and how that would impact people who are so broad-based, if you will.
Anne Rice:
Exactly.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Multiplatform.
Anne Rice:
There is introduced right at the very beginning, there is a vampire radio station, internet radio station broadcasting out New York. And it’s run by Benji Mahmoud. And Benji is one of the characters from The Vampire Armand, Benji, and Sybelle. These two young vampires were inducted in that book.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Right that reached back to all of the books and brought these wonderful characters back.
Anne Rice:
And Benji is the one running the radio station and he is 12-years-old when he’s made a vampire. And so he’s, he’s a bad one and he’s a very flexible international type of little 12-year-old when he becomes a vampire. So naturally he’s the one to think of the technological leap forward.
Christopher Rice:
But speaking of technology, we do want to say for our listeners, we have such a high volume of listeners that some people are experiencing trouble with our media player. We do have free mobile apps that you can download through the website, and we will be replaying this broadcast all week long, continuously. And there will be a free podcast up tomorrow. So if we’re flickering for you tonight, we will be up and rolling in just another hour for everyone.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And it is often helpful, we’re told, to close the website and reopen it, and sometimes that will get your connection back up and running if you’re having… Sorry to hear people are having that.
Christopher Rice:
Just a few people are having trouble. Todd Barcelo over in the Philippines has joined us. I don’t know what time it is for him currently, but he’s a loyal listener to the show and just a-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Wonder they have that odious Daylight Savings Time.
Christopher Rice:
I don’t know, but I don’t think we’ve ever had this number of people listen to one of our live broadcasts. So I think that is a record, and I’m very, very happy,
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Very excited.
Christopher Rice:
Very, very happy.
Anne Rice:
I’m very happy people care.
Christopher Rice:
We can continue with the pose that you had to beg us to let you on here to make the announcement, but we sort of said, “If you don’t make the announcement exclusive on The Dinner Party Show, there will be consequences.”
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We’ll talk about you when you’re gone-
Christopher Rice:
There will be two empty chairs at the table at Christmas time.
Anne Rice:
You just put a little subtle pressure, like the dissolution of the family as we know it.
Christopher Rice:
All that remains.
Anne Rice:
I understand.
Christopher Rice:
I will scatter the coven.
Anne Rice:
It’s a pleasure to announce it on the show. You give me an opportunity to actually talk about it. It’s great.
Christopher Rice:
Yeah, right. Absolutely.
Anne Rice:
I want to do that.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Yeah. It is great as an author to be able to talk about, because it’s all in your head until you talk with somebody else who’s read the book.
Anne Rice:
Absolutely.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It’s kind of freeing to be able to, and God, these characters were so real for me. I can literally talk about them like family I saw, or people I spent time with while we were in another room.
Anne Rice:
Well, there’s no other character I’ve ever written about who is as real to me as Lestat. He really is out there apart from me. I mean, I will see him. I know I’m imagining it when I see him. I don’t go, “My God. There he is.” I’m projecting the image. But really, I walk into a hotel lobby and I think, “Boy, Lestat would love this place. He’s going to stay here.”
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It’s what everybody sees, even the other authors. It wasn’t that, Lestat in that Entertainment Weekly thing, that Lestat was the vampire that they all picked as the number one vampire.
Christopher Rice:
You can be too modest to say this, but everyone else will say it for you. You forever changed the vampire genre. You took us into their heads and you took us into their souls. And nobody had done that up until you. It had all been horror. And I don’t mean, I don’t say horror disparagingly, my last novel was a horror novel, but it was a different exploration. The vampire was a pure source of evil and malevolence, even in good books, like Salem’s Lot. That was the role of the vampire. And you turn them into the outsider and the outcasts. And as we were saying, the Armistead Maupin, he was on the show a few years ago, you told a story in which characters found ways to love and care for each other outside of very traditional conservative Christian frameworks.
Anne Rice:
Definitely.
Christopher Rice:
They found other ways to support and loved one another. And I think that’s what I saw at the ball in New Orleans this past year, was this great sense of community among people who don’t feel like they’ve always belonged.
Anne Rice:
Exactly. And I absolutely loved being back at the Vampire Ball last October. I mean, it was a great thrill. Sue Quiroz has kept this going all these years, she and a number of other people in New Orleans. And it was wonderful to go back there and see all those people gathered together wearing their incredible costumes. Costumes made with love, not just care, costumes made with love. And I just was so glad to see it and so glad to see that kind of honoring of the imagination and the bonds that unite us as people who celebrate the imagination and the worlds we can create and sustain in our imagination. The paracosm that is The Vampire Chronicles. Do you know what the word paracosm-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
No, I don’t know that word. That’s new.
Anne Rice:
I just discovered that word recently. And paracosm is-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Definitely a triple word score for-
Anne Rice:
It’s a name for the dream world some children make when they’re very young. And I was one of the children who created a paracosm, that has lasted my whole life, of dream world characters. And there is such a world in my head and I’m in it every day. And it’s not in any of my novels. Paracosm is the name for that. But The Vampire Chronicles are also a paracosm. They’re a whole imaginary world.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Like a shared one. Yeah.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. They began to spin out of me with the first book and then on and on and on and on and on. I can sink into that world and live in that world. And when I stepped into the ball again in New Orleans, I saw people who shared the paracosm. I mean, that’s how I felt.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
You were all in it together.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. And have their own paracosms. And I have recognized-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Sure, this was just the point of intersection, a Venn diagram where all the different paracosms overlap at this one point.
Anne Rice:
Exactly. People have asked me in interviews over the years, well what is it about goths? What do they want? Well, who are they? And I never can really explain it, but I certainly saw it at the ball. We share some kind of love of being able to define ourselves in terms of beauty and goodness, and not necessarily subscribing to anybody else’s definition of what that is. It’s a kind of reaching for, how shall I put it, a reaching for the privilege of being ourselves, being romantic in the way we want to be romantic, of demanding a kind of beauty for ourselves, no matter really what we look like or where we come from, or how many people have told us that we’re no good, and we’re going to go to hell.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I’m not letting anybody tell us what that beauty is.
Anne Rice:
Yeah.
Christopher Rice:
Right, right.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Absolutely. It’s my definition and I don’t need yours. Thank you very much.
Anne Rice:
Yes.
Christopher Rice:
Mocha Pennington would like to know how many pages the book is going to be?
Anne Rice:
Well, in manuscript it was about 630, but I can tell you that probably will print out to a book of maybe 450 pages. I mean, this is not as big as some of the other books. This is more, I would say it’s a strong size of book, but it’s not a giant book. It’s bigger than Interview with the Vampire. It’s longer. And it’s also a book with a lot of characters and a lot of stories. So it probably is going to feel bigger than it actually is in terms of pages. It’s a lot like the The Queen of the Damned, in that regard. It’s all these people where have they been, where are they coming from? And they’re all converging on one issue, basically.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Yes. And it is no finale. I can say that having read it. It is a launch. It is a launch.
Anne Rice:
Well, yes, it’s definitely-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It’s open-ended, and things are already planned by the ending of it.
Anne Rice:
Oh, I’ve already signed the contract with Knopf for the second-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Oh, great.
Anne Rice:
… novel after this vampire novel. And I’ve already got all this material that I just couldn’t get into this one. And it just continues the story of my poor, my poor Brat Prince and his adventures in the modern world. But it’s a lot of fun-
Christopher Rice:
Poor Lestat. He’s had such a hard time.
Anne Rice:
It is a lot of fun. A lot of fun.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
It really is. It was one of those books where I really, it took me forever to read it because I think I didn’t want it to be over with.
Anne Rice:
Oh, Eric, it takes you forever to read every book.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I’m a really pokey reader.
Christopher Rice:
Eric is a really slow reader.
Anne Rice:
I’ve waited and waited on every single manuscript I’ve ever slipped to you.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I know. I’m such a pokey reader.
Christopher Rice:
I told her, I told her, I said, I was on my latest novel The Vines, which I just turned into my agent. I said, “Well, I’m waiting for Eric’s feedback.” And mom goes, “Well, you’ll be waiting a really long time because he’s got a lot of TV he’s got to cover.”
Eric Shaw Quinn:
No, it’s not that. When I’m reading friends’ books, I always want to give it my full attention. And I’m just a really slow reader. I don’t know if I am dyslexic, but there’s something-
Anne Rice:
No, I’m a slow reader.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I’m not. I’m a pokey, lip-moving, read aloud almost kind of reader. It takes me a very long time. And so for those two things, yes, that desire to give it my complete attention in a very fractured life. And then I’m just a pokey reader. Yeah. It takes me forever. But I never want those worlds to end. They were so, I was so delighted to be there with those characters and see those relationships and see some of them sparking back up. I won’t say which ones, but very excited.
Christopher Rice:
Rick Jackson would like to know if you based the Talamasca on a real organization.
Anne Rice:
Actually I didn’t, but I was inspired to create it by a couple of things I had read about, actually the book, Holy Blood Holy Grail, I think that’s the name of it.
Christopher Rice:
Which became the basis/lawsuit around The Da Vinci Code, right?
Anne Rice:
Yes. I happened to read that book when it first came out. And they maintained that there was this Priority of Zion, this secret organization that existed for centuries. I thought, what a neat thing. So I was kind of inspired by that. And I was also inspired by H. Rider Haggard’s famous novel, She. There was a guy in there who knew his lineage all the way back to ancient times, and had kept all these secrets of, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was an organization like that that had been studying the vampires and the witches all these centuries and it had endured the Dark Ages, and, whatever, and come down to us intact. And that was kind of how the Talamasca was born. And then after that, it was characters, David Talbot, Aaron Lightner, different characters who were Talamasca members and who had given their whole lives to this scholarship and were very noble.
Christopher Rice:
Excellent. Well, we’re going to take a short break here, but we’re going to, I don’t know if a lot of people know this or, I know your fans do, that many years ago, Sting wrote a song called Moon Over Bourbon Street, which was inspired by The Vampire Chronicles. And we’re going to play a short clip from it here. And then we’ll be back with Anne Rice and more talk about her exclusive announcement. The new novel is called Prince Lestat. It goes on sale October 28th, and yes, it does star the Brat Prince himself.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And advanced sales start next Sunday.
Christopher Rice:
Next Sunday, March 16th, the pre-order links go up on Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and lots of other book sales websites. And we’ll be back after this short break.
Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.
Christopher Rice:
And we are flipping through papers, and Anne Rice is eating caviar. She’s stuffed her mouth full of crackers and sturgeon eggs.
Anne Rice:
I am. Caviar is wonderful.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
That’s the only thing in her rider when she comes to visit us, she likes caviar. And so I always like putting it-
Anne Rice:
I do. It’s like ground up little vampires. It’s all black.
Christopher Rice:
Ooh, God. Okay.
Anne Rice:
Sparkly, sparkly.
Announcer:
Small vampires.
Anne Rice:
It’s ground up little Twilight vampires. That’s why they sparkle.
Christopher Rice:
So I’m happy to announce that some of our listeners who had problems with the media player earlier are hearing us fine. Todd Barcelo says there is no time change in the Philippines and the time there is currently 8:30 AM and he is listening to our broadcast live.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
So he’s in having breakfast with us.
Christopher Rice:
Yeah. And also we want a special shout-out and comforting hand to our listener and loyal party person, Greg Wilke, who lost his wife Allison recently. Greg has joined us this evening and he would like you to know that he has loved you and your book since he was 17 years old.
Anne Rice:
I love Greg.
Christopher Rice:
We love Greg.
Anne Rice:
I hope things are-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Thanks for listening, Greg.
Anne Rice:
Yeah, I’m glad you’re with us. Take care. We love you so much.
Christopher Rice:
We have a community here, many of whom are your fans, but they call themselves The Party People. Actually, you named them, The Party People. That was the nickname that stuck. And they take care of each other. It’s really wonderful.
Anne Rice:
They do. They do.
Christopher Rice:
And every now and then we have a show called You’re the Guest where they are the guest and we say fun things about them on the air.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
When they let us talk.
Christopher Rice:
We ask them questions, when they let us talk.
Anne Rice:
Well, you’re going to have to bring them here live sometime. And there’s a patio out there. We can put all these chairs and broadcast under the stars.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We have a call-in line now where people can actually call in and leave their comments, which we’ve encouraged them to do. And they’re still all too chicken, bok, bok, bok.
Christopher Rice:
We had a few, but they pretend to be other people. They try to be their own characters like we do here on the show. But the call in line is 3-2-3 PEZ TDPS, P-E-Z T-D-P-S. Just figure it out.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And we are, next week we’re actually doing The Dinner Birthday Party Show. So we’re looking for birthday greetings.
Christopher Rice:
For us. It’s our birthday.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
You can just call leave us a Happy Birthday.
Christopher Rice:
It’s going to be about us for a change here on The Dinner Party Show.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Yeah. Because there’s just not nearly enough about Christopher.
Christopher Rice:
Or Eric.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Or, yes, we’re very shy and retiring.
Christopher Rice:
What happened to Eric in a crosswalk today?
Eric Shaw Quinn:
This one time we’re going to make it about us. So yeah, call in and just say Happy Birthday and your name and where you’re from, and then we’ll play it on the air. It’ll be great fun.
Christopher Rice:
And back to our most important party person, our current guest, my mother-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Our premier party person.
Christopher Rice:
Anne Rice, our premier party person. James Kevin Gray would like to know what brought Lestat’s voice back to your head. We talked about some of that at the start of the show, but he also wants to know what part of Lestat’s personality is closest to yours.
Anne Rice:
Oh boy. Devil may care comes to mind right away. The Brat Prince personality, I’m just going to do what I want to do and nobody’s going to make me do anything else. And if I don’t want to talk to you, I’m not going to talk to you. And if I want to come in here and talk to you, I want every other novel you’re writing out of this room. It’s like that swaggering independence, that defiance.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Is it like a beat generation thing? Is he-
Anne Rice:
Nah, no. They were too cool. They were too cynical.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
He’s pretty cool.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. Yeah, he’s hot cool.
Christopher Rice:
He’s cynical.
Anne Rice:
He’s hot cool. He’s not cool cool.
Christopher Rice:
You did tell me when you were first working to capture his voice in the Vampire Lestat, after you wrote him in Interview With the Vampire, you read a lot of detective novels like James Kane and Raymond Chandler.
Anne Rice:
I did. That was very helpful when I wrote The Vampire Lestat in 1984. And I do think he talks like that, and I put that right into The Vampire Lestat, that he himself likes to pretend he’s Sam Spade. And he was reading the Black magazine and Sam Spade stories back in whenever Dashiell Hammett first wrote them. And that is his style, kind of to speak in slang when he wants to, and then to speak in a very literary way when he wants to.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
So he is vampire noir.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I like that.
Anne Rice:
That. He’s a poet with a swagger. And I don’t know what made his voice suddenly come back, but last summer it definitely came pouring through. There had been many false starts, where it just wasn’t right. And I’d write 40 pages and I think, ah, this is not it. This is not it. And I’d get very compulsive about tearing it all up. I don’t tear it up on the computer, I just save it and I have all that stuff saved. But finally, suddenly he just started speaking, and I was writing 13, 14 hours a day just taking dictation, just writing section after section. And this novel is not all in his voice. There are many sections that are in other voices. They’re in the third person from the point of view of different characters who appear, other vampires and some mortal characters in the novel, and some Talamasca characters.
But all of their voices started pouring through, and for some reason it just worked. I think all you can do as a writer to prepare for that kind of thing is you can fill yourself up with a lot of stimulating reading. I was reading a lot of detective fiction again, I must have read five Jack Reacher novels last year from Lee Child. I reread The Godfather. I reread all kinds of different novels that were all about narrative and storytelling to loosen myself up, to stop compulsively closing down on my own imagination, to open myself to it. And that helped a lot.
Christopher Rice:
But how were you experiencing that, that compulsive closing down on your own imagination, because I have my own experience of that. But was it that you wouldn’t want to focus on the plot or you would want to focus on another element of the story, like the atmospheres or the settings? What was going on for you that would, that got unblocked by that process?
Anne Rice:
The courage to just keep going. I think what happens with me is I write four or five sentences and then say, “Oh, no, no, no, they can’t begin like that,” and throw it away. Then I write another four or five sentences, and then I write four or five pages and throw that away. Finally, you just have to stick with it. You have to tell yourself, stop being a perfectionist. Stop editing and re-editing what you just did. Let it start rolling for you. You can go back later and re-read the beginning. Stop just running to the laboratory and washing your hands, trying to get them clean, trying to get everything perfect. Just calm down and keep going. And I’ve had that problem all my writing life. My office used to be littered with unfinished first pages of the book I was working on as I would tear them out of the typewriter and throw them on the floor.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I know that feeling. It’s like you almost feel like by the time you finally commit to a first page, you know the whole book.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. Exactly.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
The first line writes the whole book somehow, in some sort of magical kind of way, and you just try and capture that first line. I’ve just been through that with the murder mystery that I’m working on. I’m trying to find exactly the starting point.
Anne Rice:
Yes, exactly. And that can destroy you if you can’t make yourself relax and just go forward. I read an essay a while back that somebody posted on my Facebook page about switching to writing by hand. If you can’t do it on the typewriter, go try a pen and see if you can make the flow come with the pen. I thought that was pretty good at voice. But anyway, his voice started to come. I started to write it.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I will say, not to be spoilery, but as a tease that I believe that when you read this book, you will see how Lestat came back to Anne, I believe-
Anne Rice:
That’s interesting.
Christopher Rice:
Well, that’s a bold statement.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I believe that-
Anne Rice:
That’s a bold statement.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I believe that it’s intrinsic in the way that the book is written, and the story that you actually tell in this particular book, I think is almost descriptive of Lestat’s return to you.
Christopher Rice:
We have a listener on the page. Bobby Carmaker, I hope, I always say that. I always live in terror of pronouncing somebody’s name wrong. He would like us to know that the Twilight books are what introduced him to you.
Anne Rice:
Well, I actually loved the Twilight Books. I have nothing against them at all. And when I made the joke about little sparkly vampires chopped up in the caviar, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.
Christopher Rice:
I didn’t hear the sparkly part. And I don’t think they did, either, but they did now. There’s the full quote.
Anne Rice:
No, no.
Christopher Rice:
Nobody’s going to be paying attention to the new book.
Anne Rice:
Let me clarify this. I think Stephenie Meyer did a great thing. I really do. And I mean, I’m in awe of what she did, and I don’t see any reason to make fun of this particular person’s vampires or somebody else’s vampires. The concept of the vampire is a big, rich concept. It’s wonderful that Stephenie took it and did something completely original with it. Same with Charlaine Harris. I love what Charlaine Harris did with Sookie Stackhouse and the True Blood thing. I think it’s just great. None of that stopped me from coming back.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I think, what was their dream description? It’s the overlap of the peri, what was it?
Anne Rice:
The paracosm.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
The paracosm. It’s an overlap of vampire paracosms.
Anne Rice:
Sure. It’s their paracosm.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
They’re all very much a part of the same sort of that Interview With the Vampire world. And I think they all have said that of you and of the world that you created. It inspired their sort of branch of that world.
Anne Rice:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we’re all doing our own thing and there’s room for all of us. And I think Stephenie Meyer has turned on millions of kids to reading who maybe wouldn’t have been into reading and the joy of reading.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
For everybody who says that reading is going out, have a look at those sales for those.
Anne Rice:
The same thing with J.K. Rowling with the Harry Potter. She did the same thing. I mean, it’s all good. Every time a writer makes it big like Stephenie Meyer, we all make it big.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Absolutely.
Anne Rice:
I made a joke about sparkly vampires in the caviar and I don’t mean anything mean about it at all.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And they’re delicious.
Christopher Rice:
So you had a music request, which we are going to accommodate. We want to have more time in the hour to talk to you, but we’re going to play a short portion from a song by an artist named Mary Fahl, who many may know as the lead singer from a band called the October Project. And this is Exiles, which was written for The Wolves of Midwinter, your last book. Is that correct?
Anne Rice:
Yes. And the rumor has it that Mary will be at the Vampire Ball in New Orleans. That she will come, and I hope that she will sing Exiles.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Here’s hoping.
Anne Rice:
And she is one of the people to whom this novel is dedicated, Mary Fahl.
Christopher Rice:
Fantastic. All right. So here is Exiles by Mary Fahl. We’re going to play a short sample and then we’ll be back here on The Dinner Party Show with Anne Rice.
Announcer:
You are listening to The Dinner Party Show with Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn, where dessert is the most important meal of the day.
Christopher Rice:
Welcome back to The Dinner Party Show. I’m Christopher Rice.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.
Christopher Rice:
And our guest tonight is my mother, Anne Rice, the mother of all vampires. The Queen of, no, that’s not going to a good place.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
The Queen of the Demand?
Christopher Rice:
The Queen of the Demand, not the Queen of the Damned.
Anne Rice:
You can call me the Queen of the Damned. It’s okay.
Christopher Rice:
So we have announced that your next book will be Prince Lestat. It will be the next chapter in The Vampire Chronicles. It will be in your words, a true sequel to The Queen of the Damned, which picks up with the storylines there. And so we are having the inevitable movie questions. When will we see another Lestat movie? We’ve talked about this on this show a whole bunch. I’ve written a script for Tale of the Body Thief, under your direction.
Anne Rice:
Yes, you have. Yes.
Christopher Rice:
And so people want to know about it.
Anne Rice:
Well, we’re in talks and we have high hopes. There’s nothing we can announce because we’re still in talks. And we have very wonderful creative people who are very interested in doing this and wonderful studios interested. And we have wonderful agents working on it. I know this is all I can say at this point. And I think the script you wrote is just dynamite. I think you really got it.
Christopher Rice:
We all know how particular you can be. So I’m very flattered.
Anne Rice:
And I think Tale of the Body Thief is an outstanding choice for a film because you have an opportunity in Tale of the Body Thief to tell a great adventure story, I think, with Lestat in contemporary time, and also to flashback on his life, and talk about how he became who he was, and put in chunks of the Vampire Lestat, which has never been done in a movie.
Christopher Rice:
Absolutely.
Anne Rice:
And which people really want to see. Tale of the Body Thief is the perfect vehicle for both those things to happen. The contemporary story of him switching bodies with somebody and learning a lot. And also flashing back over and over again on the pivotal moments.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And explaining his own relationship to being a vampire.
Anne Rice:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We love that about that book.
Christopher Rice:
As one of the producers we were working with at one point pointed out, it is the tale of a vampire who discovers he truly can’t die. So how does he deal with that? He has got nowhere to go. Not even, he tries to kill himself by flying into the sun, which I included in the script. And he survives it because he has ancient blood from the queen of all vampires.
Anne Rice:
Exactly. Yeah. And I think the script that you wrote, you got all that in there. You got a lot of flashbacks on his early life and how he came to be a vampire and so forth. I have high hopes for the whole project. I mean, someday, let’s hope-
Christopher Rice:
Our fingers are crossed.
Anne Rice:
… we’ll get this movie done. I mean, I think a lot of people would love to see Lestat come back to the screen and-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
The stars align. That’s how movies get made. One of my favorite stories from this Oscar season was The Dallas Buyers Club. Story where 137 times it was turned down and then they made it. And there they were. Best Picture nomination and all.
Anne Rice:
Absolutely, spectacular. Spectacular movie.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Yeah. But that’s kind of the business. It’s the nature of no and no and no and no and no. And then everything all at once. And so, fingers crossed.
Anne Rice:
Yeah. So I think it looks good. I think maybe we will have some Hollywood news later this year. I certainly hope so.
Christopher Rice:
Fingers crossed.
Anne Rice:
And we do have some valiant agents who are working on this with us.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Yeah. It’s not like people don’t want it to happen.
Anne Rice:
And a valiant producer, too, who is working on it and wants very much for it to happen. Some really brilliant Hollywood people.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Here’s hoping.
Christopher Rice:
Absolutely. We do want to tell people we, and we promoted flash giveaways on the Facebook page and there was so much excitement we got a little overloaded and crazy on our social media channels this evening. So we will be doing them later in the week. And do you want to explain how this works? You do this on your page all the time.
Anne Rice:
Yeah, do it on The Dinner Party Facebook page, ask a question and then you can choose a winner. The best answer. Or you can let Facebook give you the most likes on the answer. You can do it either way.
Christopher Rice:
So it’s not a yes or no question, it’s a subjective, and then people in the thread vote on which answer they like the most.
Anne Rice:
Which answer they like the best.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
I love the caption, I love the caption contest.
Anne Rice:
I would suggest you do both. You would pick some winners and then let Facebook pick some of the winners simply by tabulating the likes on the answer.
Christopher Rice:
And our prize would be-
Anne Rice:
And I’ll personalize the book copies of hard covers of the Vampire Lestat, his first, his real autobiography, 1984. And I’ll personalize them for the winners.
Christopher Rice:
And let’s be clear, we don’t have copies of Prince Lestat to give away at this time.
Anne Rice:
No, there are no such thing as a copy of Prince Lestat.
Christopher Rice:
And it’s very possible that they will be embargoed until publication day.
Anne Rice:
Well, they’re talking about that. They want to keep it secret. But I’m hoping I can get some early readers copies for lots of People of the Page and Dinner Party people, too. But I have to work with Knopf on that, how many Advanced Reader Copies they’ll print up for me and let me give out to people. But I’d certainly love to shoot Greg Wilke a copy and Todd Barcelo and Samico Salison and Georgie Pendragon. And gosh, I’m going to leave people out. Philip Cohen. So many people.
Christopher Rice:
Now we know who the publisher’s going to be hearing from if they won’t provide those copies.
Anne Rice:
But there’s so many, and Talitha, and there are just so many people. I don’t want even, I’m scared-
Christopher Rice:
You set them all up for disappointment by listing them off. Brace yourselves, Talitha and-
Anne Rice:
Granny Good Witch.
Christopher Rice:
Buffy Peterson.
Anne Rice:
Yeah, yeah. Buffy Peterson. There’s just so many people that I would love to get those copies to and I will. But I don’t know how long it’ll take.
Christopher Rice:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, my God, we only have a few minutes left.
Anne Rice:
I can’t believe it.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Goodness. How quickly that went.
Anne Rice:
I don’t want to leave.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Well, there’s still caviar. So you can stick around for a bit.
Anne Rice:
I can stay and eat caviar.
Christopher Rice:
And we want to tell people, if you only heard part of tonight’s show, we’re going to be re-airing it continuously for the entire week at thedinnerpartyshow.com. And if you download our free mobile apps, you will also be connected to that same stream. And we will have a free podcast version of it tomorrow. And we are going to work tirelessly to try to get a YouTube clip just of the announcement itself up on our YouTube channel as soon as possible.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Pronto. But the big news is Lestat is back, back, back.
Christopher Rice:
He’s back. Lestat lives.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Advanced sales link should be up next Sunday in honor of my birthday at all your favorite bookseller pages.
Christopher Rice:
And we want to hashtag this puppy, #princelestat because that is the title of the book.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And then the book actually comes out next October 28th.
Anne Rice:
And I will be in New Orleans and at the Vampire Ball and you’ll be with me.
Christopher Rice:
We will all be at the Vampire ball.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
For the Lestat Coronation Ball.
Anne Rice:
And listen guys, if you want to know about the ball, just Google, it’ll come up. The Vampire Lestat Fan Club in New Orleans, they have a website.
Christopher Rice:
Undead Con is the name of the weekend conference. And I believe that’s how you can it on Google.
Anne Rice:
And we will post a lot on this page and on my page, my Facebook page about the ball. I think there are only a thousand people who can get into the ball. So do buy your tickets early.
Christopher Rice:
Buy your tickets early and often, if you have friends.
Anne Rice:
We’ve had balls where we had five and 6,000 people down there.
Christopher Rice:
Well, we have new episodes of The Dinner Party Show every Sunday night at 8:00 PM Eastern, 5:00 PM Pacific. And we will be back next week with the, I always say it wrong.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
The Dinner Birthday Party Show.
Christopher Rice:
The Dinner, because it’s my birthday and Eric Shaw Quinn’s birthday.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
But it’s also You’re the Guest, you are invited to celebrate our birthdays together. And so we need for you to call 3-2-3 TDPS…
Christopher Rice:
PEZ TDPS.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
PEZ TDPS, and leave your birthday greetings for us to play on next week’s show. So we’re counting on you now. Don’t be chicken.
Christopher Rice:
Something tells me we’re going to get a lot of messages asking for a copy of Prince Lestat.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We’re not playing those.
Christopher Rice:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
We’ll send, we’ll forward them.
Christopher Rice:
Yeah. Well, Mom, thank you for-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Thanks for sharing this with us.
Christopher Rice:
… fitting us in this evening.
Anne Rice:
Guys, this has been so much fun. Thank you for making it has very special. I really enjoyed being able to say-
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Congratulations. We’re so excited.
Anne Rice:
It’s done. It’s done. It’s happening.
Christopher Rice:
Excellent. Excellent.
Anne Rice:
And I want to go right home and get into Prince Lestat 2.
Christopher Rice:
The next one, is there a title for Prince Lestat 2 that you can share?
Anne Rice:
Yeah. Vicky. Vicky Wilson suggested a great title, Blood Paradise.
Christopher Rice:
Wow.
Anne Rice:
It’s a spinoff. Some lines from Wallace Steven’s, a poem, a wonderful poem and we may name it, Blood Paradise.
Christopher Rice:
Fantastic. All right. Well I hate to end this show.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
You heard it here first.
Christopher Rice:
You heard it here first. It was a Dinner Party Show exclusive.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
Our only one.
Christopher Rice:
Absolutely. And next week we’ll be back to bitching about our lives.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And getting older.
Christopher Rice:
And getting older. I’m Christopher Rice.
Eric Shaw Quinn:
And I’m Eric Shaw Quinn.
Christopher Rice:
Say goodnight, Anne.
Anne Rice:
Goodnight guys.
The Dinner Party Show with Christopher Rice & Eric Shaw Quinn podcast
