Let slip your undead hordes

It's an opinion my arch-friend Ben gladly spews at anyone within earshot. "Anne Rice sucks." He should know, rarely reading, watching or playing anything that doesn't somehow involve zombies, vampires or demon tentacles.

He rarely gets excited about anything, and that made me want to read some Anne Rice. The desire was short lived. I started to read something and didn't like it, so I stopped. I don't even remember what it was. That was the end of my interest in Anne Rice until today. The NY Times has an article that has reinvigorated my curiosity.

"Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander"

That was among the things she wrote in an open letter to her detractors, which she published on September 6th on Amazon.com's Customer Reviews.

Yes. She called the opinions of those fanboy critics slander. Anne Rice, who makes a living at knowing the interrelations of words. Slander, not libel. Slander.

It really struck a nerve, those things they said.

She has every right to be mad, the fans having clearly broken the rules she's lain down. She does the writing, they're buy the books and keep their insignificant mouths shut. When she uses her narrator to chastise people who didn't like her book Memnoch the Devil, those people are supposed to thank her, not respond to her soliloqual tirade. She types, you read. Idiots.

Against the presumptuous assertion that she needs an editor, Anne calls her writing a "virtuoso performance . . . not a collaborative art." Maybe that's the problem Anne. Collaboration allows you an outside perspective when your work is going in dangerous directions--directions like egomaniacal pontificating and unintentional self-parody.

The new book's called Blood Canticle for God's sake. Can you think of a more telling name for a book about vampires from an author who compares herself to "Pavarotti [and] Marilyn Horne?"

In order to write this, of course, she had to use an Amazon account. Surprisingly for someone who hates criticism, this wasn't the first time she'd used Amazon's open forums. She's something of a closet critic herself. Here they are, all her reviews.

And therein I think I've found the problem: she's totally incapable of saying an ill word about anything. She gives everything she's ever read or watched 5 stars. Everything is, in her mind, the greatest thing ever. Not simply her own works, but also Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, scores of Biblical criticism, and, of course, Batman Returns.

I think we can all learn a little something from Anne Rice about inclusion and magnanimity. Or insipid frivolity--one of those.