Happy 70th birthday, Anne Rice!

Sure, vampires are all the rage these days. But before Stephenie Meyer extended the audience of unspeakable blood rites to include the tween demographic, there was The Vampire Chronicles.

Love or hate sexually-ambivalent, photophobic antiheroes, The Vampire Chronicles have indubitably left a mark on the neo-gothic imagination. Anne Rice’s fiction is at least interesting in that it sometimes features narration done in the epistolary style, in keeping with the great tradition of Victorian horror.