Called Out of Darkness
Some twenty-years ago a friend gave me a book called The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. It’s a lushly written tale about man involuntarily damned to an eternity outside salvation and his struggle to define his own morality in a world he believes is beyond the reach of God. He’s a rebel, a braggart, and a murderer but he’s also a man in search of his soul, a monster grieving his lost humanity, a sinner longing for an absolution he knows he doesn’t deserve and is convinced that no one can ever provide.
I was a young man at the time, rebelling against much of what I’d been taught and questioning everything. I suppose I saw something of myself in Lestat. But what caught my attention more than anything else was that I had the sense that the heart and soul of the book, and indeed much of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which I would go on to read for years, was the author’s struggle with questions of the divine as she used her characters to inch toward the truth.
To this day it’s a book that shapes the way I write and the way I think about story and character and despite Anne Rice’s public façade as an atheist and staunch opponent of the Church, I’ve always felt that there was more to her story than she led the world to believe.
A few years ago, I was startled to discover her book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt in a bookstore. My first reaction was, “Ah-HAH! I knew it!” But I never read it, in part because I was afraid I’d find out it was just a gimmicky way for her to capitalize on some controversial new idea.
Since then that book has received a sequel called Christ the Lord: Road to Cana, and I’ve heard here and there that she’s accepted Christianity. As much as I wanted to believe it, I was still very much a skeptic. Such was my mindset when I cracked open her ‘spiritual memoir’ Called Out of Darkness.
I am a skeptic no more. Her memoir is equally a confession, an explanation, and a proclamation. Her own words describe it best:
“What I must do here is convey to the general reader—the member of the mainstream who is my brother or sister in the mainstream—how the Incarnation has become the central overwhelming and sustaining mystery of my life. “
Such an about face of worldview surely came as a shock to some fans her vampire mythology and there is a sense that she wants to lay out the pieces of the puzzle to provide insight for those to whom the final image was a surprise. She also aims to lay to rest the suspicions of those that may think her conversion is flighty, shallow, or spur of the moment.
It’s a rare pleasure to hear an author whose work you’ve loved talk about her life and career as she looks back on it from the wisdom of her years. She recounts memories from her childhood as a Catholic in an edenic New Orleans and her eventual falling away as a young woman. Anyone familiar with her writing will be thrilled to see how the events, people, and places of her formative years have shaped her stories for three decades. Not only did I gain a wealth of understanding about why she wrote her books but I found myself thinking, “Of course she wrote these books, how she could have done anything else?”
And all the musings I’ve had over the years about the questions and longings bound up in her stories, about the struggle of her characters, finally found an answer:
“These books transparently reflect a journey through atheism and back to God. It is impossible not to see this. They reflect an attempt to determine what is good and what is evil in an atheistic world. They are about the struggle of brothers and sisters in a world without credible fathers and mothers. They reflect an obsession with the possibility of a new and enlightened moral order.
Did I know this when I wrote them? No.”
What a joy to hear her tell the world how she came to the realization that her entire life and work were pointing toward Christ, and better yet, to hear how she has embraced the challenge of the cross and is proclaiming it to the world. Truly, this is a rare thing in popular culture.
There are certainly points where I disagree with her but she is a woman of fierce intellect and much like C.S. Lewis she has come to Christ after years of scholarship and critical thought. In the years before her conversion she says that she was hounded and even “haunted by Christ.” She makes clear in her writing that her faith is something she has accepted with the utmost sincerity and seriousness. There is no lightness in her undertaking and she makes a point of rejecting any form of ‘prosperity gospel’.
What drew her finally to Christ was, I think, the story: the sense that God is the Author and Christ the eternal hero. In the loving of that great, universal, and infinitely personal narrative she has committed herself to using her own sub-creative gifts in the service of the Creator. She intends to write for Christ, and only for Christ, and the outpouring of that commitment is the Christ the Lord series, a realistic narrative of the life of Christ. There is no gimmickry involved and no scandal. She intends her books to be absolutely faithful to the Gospel in word, deed, and doctrine.
I have not read these books yet but reading Called Out of Darkness has convinced me that I must. If you are a longtime fan of Rice’s work you owe it to yourself to read the memoir and if you have never read a word of her writing, I suggest that it may well be a fine place to start.
Anne Rice’s books and characters often fail to find the answers they seek, their stories are invariably tragic and full of longing, grief, and brokeness, they often refuse to resolve in a way that is comforting to the reader. In that context it is incredibly moving to me that those tattered threads seem to have at last found resolution, not in the arc of the story, but in the life of the author.
A.S. Peterson has crafted a work of compelling historical fiction which begs the question, “Can this really be a debut novel?” With dogged fidelity, Peterson captures the spirit, manners, and social conditions present during the American Revolutionary War. We meet colorful, credible characters who navigate the high seas of life and love, dependence and independence, war and peace, truth and consequence, and despite forays into dark places, The Fiddler’s Gun is beautiful, lyrical, and redemptive.
Walt Wangerin, Jr. strikes again.
Janner Igiby lives in Glipwood, a nothing little village in the land of Skree, on the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Manhood is on the horizon, but Janner finds it hard to feel much hope for the future. Skree is ruled by foreign oppressors, snake men called the Fangs of Dang, servants of a shadowy emperor named Gnag the Nameless. The Skreeans are weak and weaponless. They’re even tool-less. Any Skreean who needs to use a hoe has to borrow one from the Fangs (and fill out the requisite paperwork). And from time to time, the Black Carriage arrives in Glipwood to carry young Skreeans toward an unknown fate across the Dark Sea.
I am not a fan of Civil War literature; in fact, I have always thought of it as one of those weird sub-genres for obsessive types. They’re almost like Trekkies with their re-enactments and maniacal devotion to detail. It’s just not my thing (although I’m secretly jealous that they get to dress up and shoot cannons).
A Randall Goodgame song is like a great independent movie. Characters deliver lines like they were lifted from a break room, a truck stop, or a downtown diner. Seemingly incongruent scenes are juxtaposed and plot isn’t obvious; in fact, narrative–a good story–is often more evident than linear plot lines. An indie movie, like a Randall Goodgame song, seems to tell itself. Rather than being rudely yanked by a chain through a sequence of contrived events, with a Randall Goodgame song, I have the sense that I’m being allowed a willing, but vicarious sneak peak into the real lives of his real characters.
Sara Groves irritates me just a little bit. With each album she makes, she moves from strength to strength and is always raising the bar with the quality, depth, and lyrical ambition of her work. And as a fellow artist, that’s just a little irritating since it means the rest of us are going to have to work harder if we hope to keep up.
I am outside on my front porch. The yellowed leaves are methodically falling from the black walnut in the yard, my breath is chalky visible in the recent cold snap, and lately I have been exploring the unpleasant nuances of the dark night of a soul - my own, to be exact. It is a strange passion we live out on this over-glorified orb of rock hurtling through space at some rate that I’m sure would astound me were I to know what it was. It is an odd series of days, I am realizing, when you question your own faith more than you question your own doubt. And, indeed, it is these nagging questions which have prompted me to share my thoughts on Andrew Peterson’s 2003 album, Love and Thunder.
11-year old Reuben Land, a character in the 2001 book Peace Like a River, provides narration that is clear-eyed and insightful, yet retains the magic, wonder, and innocence of youth. I found it easy to entrust my imagination to the author’s clever method of telling the story through the sensibilities of a pre-teen boy. An author with lesser skill would have either made the boy too smart-alecky for his own good or impossibly cute.
I just finished a book that upon closing it, I felt like it finished me in a sense. A quiet meditative book that reached down and stirred the deep waters in me. It’s Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 Pulitzer prize winner Gilead, given to me by my friend Andrew Peterson.
Eric Peters’s body of work addresses a diverse range of topics, but hope is a recurring theme that gently percolates in the midst of it all. And yet, somewhere between the 2001 masterpiece Land of the Living, and Scarce, the flavor of hope that Peters’s work emits has evolved closer to a tone that is more resolute than what came before. And though the complexion of hope has a broad range, the lyrics from Scarce–while intermittently contrite and timorous as in previous efforts, are now strengthened and bolstered by roots that have grown deeper, radiating an underlying grit and security.
Having read The Great Divorce many times over the years, I’ve found this classic from the great C.S. Lewis to be full of startling clarity and depth on the differences between Heaven and Hell. The only thing both have in common is that both begin in the human will; we can either let Heaven enter us and rule in us to blossom into love and goodness, or allow Hell to infect and reign in our hearts by the daily refusal to submit to Heaven.
Even if you haven’t heard Room to Breathe, its still likely you’ve heard Andy Gullahorn. He’s what I’d call a heavy lifter by trade. He writes lyrics, plays guitar, arranges vocals and adds production help to the work of artists like Jill Phillips and Andrew Peterson.
Allow me to preface this by telling you that I am a great despiser of gushing reviews. I’d much rather write (or read) a scathing dismemberment of the latest Brett Ratner film or Terry Goodkind book than suffer through four hundred words of overblown hyperbole about even the best of things. But when asked to write some thoughts on Frederick Buechner’s Godric, no amount of distaste for high praise was able to intervene. I hope you’ll take what I say with the understanding that I do not say it readily or lightly.
What a beautiful review! I have this book, but haven’t read it yet. You’ve made me want to read it asap.
Rice conducted a fascinating interview with Focus on the Family’s Jim Dobson back in October. You can listen to it here. Listening to her talk about the theological and philosophical changes in her thinking was facinating. I was frustrated, though, to hear her say at the end that faith in God basically meant that she had repudiated all genre fiction and to imply that the only appropriate art for Christians to make was recasting Bible stories.
What I took from the book was that that was a choice she had made for herself. After spending thirty years writing books that people often considered profane she made a very deliberate decision to devote all of her talent to Christ.
If she contends that such specificity is an obligation for all Christians then I’d certainly disagree with that.
Great review. Thank you for bringing this to light. Like you I’ve been dragging my feet on reading her Bible based fiction. As important as I believe it is to retell the gospel story and explore its depths, I am often intuitively hesitant about fully involved pieces of Biblical fiction. Even with Buechner, whose work I’ve fed on since High School, I even occasionally feel uncomfortable (not the good kind of discomfort either) with what I feel like he has brought into the old stories. Maybe it has to do with growing up in the Bible belt where Scripture is often treated with superstition rather than holy reverence? I may need to start with this memoir first.
By the way, you might enjoy a fascinating piece that my friend wrote about her for the Burnside Writers Collective. It includes an interview and brings in a variety of perspectives on her work:
http://www.burnsidewriterscollective.com/general/2007/01/illumination_and_darkness.php?page=1
He did an audio interview with her for Relevant magazine too, though I haven’t listened to it:
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/issues/19/RiceInterview.mp3
Very interesting. I wondered about her faith after I saw the last 2 “Christ the Lord” books. Would anyone recommend reading the Vampire Chronicle books?
Pete,
Very compelling review. The idea that we all cry out for God even before we know we are doing it is something I keep in mind when I am praying for others.
I am beginning to fear the amount of influence you have over me. I’ll try to explain it after my copy of Viva La Vida arrives in the mail.
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana was one of my favourite books from last year. It’s beautifully written, almost devotional. Not gimmicky, but amazing to have it in the first person voice of Jesus.
The first one (Out of Egypt) is wonderful as well, especially the insightful apologetics included in the afterword.
I was interested in her conversion as well which led me to read Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. It’s a fascinating book which has changed my perspective on the culture and context in which Jesus grew up. There is not much biblical groundwork to go by when writing about the childhood of Jesus so she did use some extra biblical texts including the apocrypha. It was fascinating to delve into the mind of the young Christ and think about how his fully human side may have interacted with his fully God side. It is evident that Anne Rice heavily researched in preparation and it is well written but it should probably be regarded as fiction.
Pete,
Thanks for the review. I had read of Rice’s conversion as part of the publicity for her Christ the Lord series. I certainly did a double-take the first time I saw her name connected writings dealing with the life of Jesus.
What I have been seeing in the paper matches up with what you are sharing from the book. I guess she wrote it to give fuller treatment to a story that I’m sure had most of her fans dumbfounded. Awesome!
I have read both of her Christ the Lord novels and found them deeply thought-provoking. I especially loved The Road to Cana, especially the scenes in which Jesus’ purity in the face of temptation to give into his desire for the love of a woman is depicted, and the temptation in the wilderness, and Jesus’ conversation with his new disciples at the wedding, after he turns water to wine. She has obviously reflected very deeply on the mission and identity of Christ, and every Christian (especially comfortable, prosperity focused Christians) would gain much from her insights buried within the life of Jesus. It is a wonderful (in some cases, superior) addition to the canon of novels depicting the life of Jesus, including Wangerin’s “Jesus” and “The Book of God.”
Don’t wait, get right to reading these novels. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised. I got her biography for Christmas, and I’m looking forward to reading it soon.
Sid, I highly recommend the books of hers that I’ve read.
I never read Interview With A Vampire. I started the chronicles with The Vampire Lestat (which is still my favorite).
I recall being a bit put off by Queen of the Damned (ignore the movie) but it was necessary to the storyline.
The Body Thief and Memnoch the Devil are excellent however. Memnoch the Devil is particularly interesting as it deals with Lestat basically being given a tour of Creation and the heavenly realms by the devil and at the end is offered a place at the devil’s side. I won’t spoil the ending but I’ll say that it will make you wonder why an atheist would write it.
I lost track of the series after that book but I really enjoyed some of her other stories. While I do recommend them, I need to mention that they are certainly not for everyone. They stretch some boundaries with the way they play with issues of religion and gender, but they are beautifully written books that are far deeper and more profound than the weird gothic vampire fan culture that they have inspired.
My best advice is to read The Vampire Lestat. If you enjoy that, you are likely to enjoy the others. If it is too much for you, then you’ll probably want to stay away.
Just read the piece that Chris linked above and it’s really good. Recommended reading. Here it is again if you missed it:
http://www.burnsidewriterscollective.com/general/2007/01/illumination_and_darkness.php?page=5
So glad to see that she has written this book. Thanks for posting that terrific review. I’ll be sure to check it out. I’m also a big fan of Lestat and the scene with the wolves is one of my favorite scenes in any book.
When she wrote Christ The Lord, Out of Egypt, I read the epilogue first at Barnes and Noble and I found it deeply moving. I went home and wrote her on a whim to thank her for being so open about the whole experience and we ended up having a few email correspondences. She was very gracious and open about her journey back to faith. I think she was truly stunned by the outpouring of response to her epilogue.
There is something about all this with Anne Rice and her perspective that is very refreshing.
Chris,
Thanks for the link. A fascinating article.
Pete,
I wouldn’t say that Rice explicitly claimed that only recasting Scripture made for good Christian art. It was more implicit, her sole examples of such art being those kind of pieces. And at the end of the interview, she outright said that she wouldn’t do any more vampire novels. That being said, she has obviously gone through some very dark times in her life. I understand wanting to take a break from it in one’s writing.
Read it, believed it, loved it…the story of Anne Rice’s life is a story of God working outside of the box we put Him in…who could have imagined such a tale…only God.
Pete - thanks for bringing these up. I devoured “Out of Egypt” and I can’t believe I haven’t bought the second book yet. I’m going to order it today. And you are so right that this is such a rare thing in popular culture. I was telling a friend recently that Ms. Rice devoting her full powers to the subject of the true Christ bids me to consider what a Sting record or a Ryan Adams record would be like were they captured by the Gospel in the same way.
I’d have to agree that her two books on Christ are good reads. From both a theological and fictional perspective they were solid and enjoyable. Of course with any historical fiction the author has to fill in blanks but she does to faithfully and we obvious research.
Now, I think I will have to read The Vampire Lestat and her memoir. Thanks for the recommendations.
Sorry about the typos above. I meant to say that “she does so faithfully and with obvious research.”
Somehow, I missed this thread. Rice’s quest demonstrates—once again—that a fervent, devout search for Truth can be prefereable to a sleepy faith, devoid of passion, mystery, and wonder. The journey for Truth is often vital, alive, and leads to a strong infrastructure of Belief. Meanwhile, the later is lazy, and subject to being tossed about in the wind, like a piece of litter. Thanks for a top shelf review, Pete.