Hummmm, is there a pattern emerging here?

The gospel according to Anne Rice
January 22, 2006
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Author Anne Rice at her $A10.7million mansion in La Jolla, California. Rice has left vampires behind, and turned to Jesus.


Anne Rice has turned her creative attention to the man she refers to as a supernatural hero, Jesus Christ, she tells John Marshall.

Anne Rice could have been dead, maybe should have been dead, not once but twice. First came the diabetic coma in 1998, that sudden descent to death's door after the most basic sort of flu-like symptoms. The coma left her paralysed for a time, unable to think or speak with much coherence, a terrifying and frustrating condition that did disappear over time but led to great despair.

"I should be dead," Rice kept thinking to herself. "A mistake has been made."

Then came the ruptured appendix a couple of years later, another brush with death for the best-selling vampire chronicler, followed by yet another reprieve. And that prompted her to reflect later that this was no mistake, that she had been spared for a purpose, a higher purpose involving her newfound faith in God and a new novel on a far different subject.

"If I had died earlier, I would have left something behind of value," Rice says. "But I trust there is a reason that this has happened instead. I trust that this was the journey I had to make. Sometimes I would receive flashes that this is what I was meant to do. Because I am alive, when the expectation was that I should be dead."

Rice's new novel sits high on the US bestseller lists again, but that is all that seems the same in her life these days. At 64, one of America's most popular authors radiates calmness, happiness and even humility in the aftermath of one of the most startling about-faces in the annals of bestsellerdom. It's adieu to vampires forever, Lestat & friends RIP; hello to the new 21st-century gospel, the life of Jesus as interpreted by Rice.

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is the first of a projected three or four novels that Rice hopes will illuminate Jesus and his world in fresh ways drawn from her exhaustive historical research and her voluminous readings, including the 200 different translations of the Bible that she keeps in her $US8 million ($A10.7 million) mansion in La Jolla, California.
[link to www.whatdoesitmean.com]