Anne Rice on 'Prince Lestat,' a new vampire novel

When Anne Rice published "Interview With the Vampire" in 1976, she didn't just launch her own vampire series -- her sexy tragic vampire antiheroes launched an entirely new genre.

The phrase paranormal romance "didn't exist when I wrote the vampire novels in the beginning," Rice says. But the genre, she adds, "is here to stay." Indeed, after an 11-year break, the grande dame of vampire fiction has revived her famous vampire clan with "Prince Lestat" (Alfred A. Knopf, $28.95).

Today the field is crowded with hits like "Twilight," "True Blood" and countless other television shows, movies, graphic novels and books. For a long time, Rice avoided it all. "I was always frightened of being too influenced, and I would get blocked," she admits.

Serving up lunch on formal china at her house in Palm Desert, California, she explains that she thought she had closed the book on her "Vampire Chronicles" with 2003's "Blood Canticle." After that, she allowed herself to enjoy other people's vampire stories. "I got less scared in my 60s. ... I came to realize we all make our own cosmology, and there are certain traits that are common to all of the fiction in this area. I just grew up." Emotional maturity aside, the 73-year-old author has some of the habits of a teenager. A poster-size picture of actor Matt Bomer hangs on her bedroom wall -- "because I think he's gorgeous, and I like to look at him," she trills -- and she spends hours a day on Facebook.

Unlike most teenagers, her Facebook page has 1.1 million fans. Rice is so engaged -- linking to news stories, asking provocative questions and responding to comments -- that some don't believe it's actually the author. Other writers who have sold more than 100 million books worldwide may have assistants taking care of their social media presence.

"It's totally me," she confirms. "I've had some pretty nasty exchanges on the page with people who didn't believe it. I remember one woman came on, she said, 'I know Anne Rice, I've been in her house in New Orleans and you are not she.' ... I finally got angry enough to block her." The Anne Rice of today does seem different from the one a fan might have met years ago. She sold her grand New Orleans mansion and lives in relative quiet in Palm Desert. She has surrounded herself with paintings by her late husband, Stan, forsaking many of the gothic antiques and religious artifacts she once owned.

The author of the sexually explicit Sleeping Beauty Trilogy (originally published under a pen name), Rice has thought a great deal about the erotic element of her vampire myth. "Basically, the vampire is untamed mystery, and that's what men seem to women. It's a deep, deep metaphor for sexual difference. Every man's a vampire to us, in a way." Which makes the reader not the victim but the chosen partner. "I'm sure every boy and girl out there reading a vampire novel is convinced that the vampire would never bite them," Rice says, rapping on her table with the last three words: Never. Bite. Them.

In her new novel, vampires live in the modern world, listening to Internet radio and ducking cellphone paparazzi. Most of them have figured out how to use immortality to their financial advantage, and live in luxurious surroundings. And yet there is a threat that seems to be converging on them from all sides -- crowds of young vampires keep getting torched, a terrifying and complete death.

"I agonize over some of the dark and cruel things that I write. I want them, for me, to be effective and authentic and dramatic and moral, I guess," she says.

When she lived in Berkeley in the 1960s and '70s, Rice says, she used to debate with her friends about the demands of art. "If great art is really great art, it shouldn't depress you. ... If it's great art, it should be so uplifting that you come out of it feeling joy." She explains that she gave up on "Breaking Bad" because it was too depressing. So, is she in the uplifting camp? "Not necessarily. I can't resolve it," she says. That kind of tension -- between tragedy and transcendence -- is what it takes to spend half a lifetime writing stories of the glamorous undead.