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 ov