Into the Light

Novelist Anne Rice leaves the vampire Lestat and embraces Christ, “the ultimate supernatural hero” | by Lynn Vincent

Though she is a novelist, Anne Rice sees the world the way a painter might, in subtleties of light and shadow: the pale edge of dawn, the flat ink of a starless midnight, goodness for some an elusive beacon, evil an alluring shroud.

She was known for shrouds. Mrs. Rice spent nearly three decades sculpting a reputation as literary queen of the damned—and now, at age 64, she has declared that canon closed. After rejecting her Catholic faith nearly half a century ago, she says she is reconciled with God and dedicating the rest of her life to writing only for—and about—Jesus Christ.

Her first novel of this kind, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf), hit stores on Nov. 1. The first-person narrative of Jesus as a young boy follows Jesus from His family’s hiding in Egypt back to Jerusalem and Nazareth, where He slowly learns His true identity. The story emanates the light of nascent majesty, in stark contrast with the gaslight gloom of Mrs. Rice’s earlier work, and is the first in a projected series.

An interesting statement:

…Mrs. Rice’s research took her through the literature written by those she calls “the skeptical critics,” beginning with the New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment. “I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud,” she writes in an author’s note in her new book.

But she plowed on, “ready to risk everything,” particularly her newly recovered faith: “The skeptical New Testament scholarship tries to prove to you that the Gospels don’t hold up. It takes great fortitude to subject yourself to that kind of literature, to seriously take notes, to follow the arguments, to draw conclusions. You could come out destroyed.” But she came out concluding that the skeptics were wrong, perpetrators and victims of some of the worst scholarship she’d ever seen, built with poor research and reasoning on a foundation that presumed the Gospels weren’t true.

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