I was on a beach in Brazil two Christmases ago when I heard that Anne Rice had died suddenly of a stroke. The news had been posted on her son, the novelist Christopher Rice’s, Facebook page. I was shocked, though really, I should not have been. Anne was 80, after all, suffered from diabetes, and was insulin-dependent.

When I met Anne at her lovely Palm Springs home in December 2009 she had just released her memoir Called Out of Darkness, the first and only memoir she ever wrote. At the time, Anne was still in the midst of a religious experience of almost Augustinian proportions, a major life change set about in December of 1998 when she suffered a diabetic attack and went into a coma.

“I was sick enough that I really should have died,” she told me.

That same month, Anne returned to the Catholic faith.

“I went back to faith. Faith came back to me, faith in God, came back after something like 38 years of believing myself to be an atheist. I felt that faith come back and I went back to God through the doors of my childhood church, the Catholic Church … It was almost as if I was given the opportunity to return … I really don’t know exactly why that all happened the way it did. I’m just very grateful that faith came back to me.” (READ MORE from Eric Lewis: Canceling Philip Roth … And His Biographer)

Contributing to Anne’s resurrected faith, I believe, was the death of her husband of 41 years, the affable but decidedly atheistic poet Stan Rice. I did not ask her about Stan that day, though I remembered Anne had said in her memoir that Stan had nursed a lifelong hostility to religion.

It was Stan, who upon reading the manuscript for Anne’s then-unpublished and widely rejected classic, Interview with the Vampire (1976), had said to her, “This is going to change your life,” and who, according to Christopher, was the inspiration for the book’s infamous lead character, the vampire Lestat. I’ve always felt Anne’s return to religion had something to do with Stan’s death. Grief? Bargaining? Simply thinking about what comes after life? I don’t know. But after all these years I still hold that belief.

I was unaware when I arrived for my own interview with the great vamp of American letters that that day, December 9, 2009, was the seventh anniversary of Stan’s death, a fact her assistant made me aware of as the film crew were setting up in the living room.

“If she’s a little subdued, you’ll understand why,” the assistant said.

In light of this, I made a note to myself not to ask about Stan. Perhaps that was the intention all along. If so, it worked.

Anne appeared. No black wedding dress or exotic jewelry, no arriving in a coffin, as she used to do at book signings to the delight of screaming fans. Now 68, she was serene, even grave, in a turtleneck sweater and a thick wool skirt, her elegantly graying hair cut into an Anna Wintour-like bob, the total opposite of the black-clad figure framed in gold on the wall behind us, depicting my subject seated on a rococo throne, a black-pearl choker at her throat, radiating gorgeous darkness. I recognized the portrait as being the same image that had graced the dust jackets of her books for many years, the photo that I grew up looking at and studying intently, and I was just as mesmerized by it now in my late twenties as I had been as a ten-year-old. Anne Rice was an original. Purely exotic.

We talked of many things that day. Her success. Trends in publishing. Her views on her own books. She had recently abandoned her Gothic tales of vampires and witches for Christian books, rendering two fictional novels on the life of Christ: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005) and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana” (2008), as part of a stated commitment to stop writing dark novels and instead to devote her life, as she phrased it, to “writing for God.” Aside from showing Anne to be a serious student of history and a passionate believer, the “Christ the Lord” books showed her also to be a theological conservative. She openly rejected liberal theology and dismissed Dan Brown’s recent blockbuster The Da Vinci Code as historically baseless. She stated her belief that Christ should be represented in art only as sinless … and single. That was one thing about Anne: though a polite Southern girl in many respects, she’d tell you what she thought. Her passion never failed to show through.

In 2002, as Stan lay dying of a brain tumor, Anne wrote Blood Canticle (2003) which would be her final installment of the Vampire Chronicles for years. The book was published in 2003 to unabashed scorn from critics and fans who lampooned the work as the worst thing she’d ever written. Hokey, they said. Dull. A full-on failure of imagination. Some distressed that its main character, the once-evil Lestat, seemed to be turning from darkness toward light. Some fans said she’d become lazy and was now cranking out books to fulfill contracts and make money with no care given to plot, character, and the other crucial details of writing that had made her earlier books so magical. Even though the book sold decently, Blood Canticle was, on the whole, seen as a failure, a humiliating P.R. disaster for the most successful woman novelist of her generation and one of its most brilliant creative minds. On top of all that was the windfall of negative reader reviews on Amazon, then in its infancy, as reviewers openly pilloried Anne and the book with unflinching punches. (READ MORE: Can Conservative Entertainment Not Be Cringe?)

The constant drumbeat of criticism sent Anne over the edge and, in what must have been one of the first public jousts between a celebrity and online harassers, Anne took to Amazon and posted a not-so-subtle 1,200-word response to her critics. Some highlights:

First off, let me say that this is addressed only to some of you, who have posted outrageously negative comments here … I’m justifiably proud of being read by intellectual giants and waitresses in trailer parks, in fact, I love it, but who in the world are you? … There are readers out there and plenty of them who cherish the individuality of each of the [vampire] chronicles which you so flippantly condemn. They can and do talk circles around you. And I am warmed by their response. Their letters, the papers they write in school, our face to face exchanges on the road — these things sustain me when I read the utter trash that you post … If this reaches one reader who is curious about my work and shocked by the ugly reviews here, I’ve served my goals. And yo, you dude, the slang police! Lestat talks like I do. He always has and he always will. You really wouldn’t much like being around either one of us. And you don’t have to be. If any of you want to say anything about all this by all means email me at Anneobrienrice@mac.com. And if you want your money back for the book, send it to 1239 First Street, New Orleans, La, 70130. I’m not a coward about my real name or where I live. And yes, the Chronicles are no more! Thank God!

Thus ended Anne Rice’s long and lucrative reign as the Queen of Gothic Fiction. After that, she published her two novels on the life of “the Lord,” as she always phrased it when speaking of Christ, though many fans continued to assail her with criticism for leaving the vampire genre and taking up the mantle of religion.

“There is certainly a percentage of my readers who are very, very opposed to my Christian writing,” she said, “and they tell me so in very, very angry emails. And sometimes they just state flat out ‘we will not read your Christian books.’”

Anne’s tone is combative, hurt.

“It’s interesting. I’m used to being dismissed. I was dismissed for years as the vampire lady, and I was the one always sort of tugging on the sleeve of people I admire and saying, ‘Please give my books a chance, they’re about a lot more than just vampires,’ you know, ‘this is not just a junk novel about a bloodsucker for heaven’s sake, this is the best novel I know how to write.’ So I’m used to that but I’ve never confronted the total rejection that I get now, as a Christian, just total.” Emphasis hers.

Anne’s career never recovered from her foray into faith, and even after she publicly dissociated herself once more with the Catholic Church in 2010, citing disagreements with Pope Benedict on various issues, and returned to Gothic fiction, many fans refused to read her. Crowds at book signings were noticeably smaller. Anne had effectively been canceled.

Anne was a Southern Democrat. She took centrist positions on abortion and sex issues, and she hated taxes. One of her finest moments was on Charlie Rose in 1996 when she recounted her frustrations as a wealthy taxpayer. “If we don’t get rid of the IRS and get a flat tax,” she said,

we’re going to keep a nation of alienated criminals. I mean, everybody in America is an alienated person because of the IRS. Nobody can understand the rules. I recently ran a letter to President Clinton that I published in Variety. I bought the page,  you know, and I said ‘Please give us a flat tax, beat the Republicans to the punch,’ and three days later I got a letter from the IRS, we’re going to audit you,’ first time in twelve years. They came over and they haggled over little bitty things … We had a room full of lawyers and accountants … but nobody knows the tax law. Nobody knows whether this blouse is deductible because I wore it on your show. It cost $39.

Being an old-school Democrat, as opposed to a woke one, Anne was tolerant of different viewpoints, and as the new millennium yielded more and more dangerous fruit, she made known her opposition to the rising tide of insanity that was ruining a culture once famous for its tolerance. Anne publicly defended TV cook Paula Deen, one of the few celebrities to do so, during Deen’s 2013 fake-racism scandal, suggesting that Deen was possibly “ignorant” and expressed disgust that we were “becoming something of a lynch mob culture.” Anne was infuriated that so much of the online comments about Deen involved taunts about the latter’s weight. “Woe to anyone today who is not slender, young, clever, and politically correct,” Anne wrote on Facebook, her favorite social media and publicity tool. “All over this country,” she wrote, “I’ve encountered contempt for white Southerners, hatred of them, disgust for them … a blind prejudice against them that is racism in its own way. I’m frankly sick of it.” (READ MORE: La Dolce Vita: The Moral Dichotomy of the Middle Class)

In 2015, as wokeism spread to the world of publishing, Anne noted the threat posed to writers:

I think we are facing a new era of censorship, in the name of political correctness. There are forces at work in the book world that want to control fiction writing in terms of who “has a right” to write about what. Some even advocate the out and out censorship of older works using words we now deem wholly unacceptable. Some are critical of novels involving rape. Some argue that white novelists have no right to write about people of color; and Christians should not write novels involving Jews or topics involving Jews. I think all this is dangerous. I think we have to stand up for the freedom of fiction writers to write what they want to write, no matter how offensive it might be to someone else. We must stand up for fiction as a place where transgressive behavior and ideas can be explored. We must stand up for freedom in the arts. I think we have to be willing to stand up for the despised. It is always a matter of personal choice whether one buys or reads a book. No one can make you do it. But internet campaigns to destroy authors accused of inappropriate subject matter or attitudes are dangerous to us all. That’s my take on it. Ignore what you find offensive. Or talk about it in a substantive way. But don’t set out to censor it, or destroy the career of the offending author. Comments welcome. I will see you tomorrow.

They don’t make Democrats like that anymore.

When Anne died, her death received a level of attention that is unusual for a writer these days, as fans of all backgrounds, religions, and viewpoints mourned the special person whose evocative works and unique voice had defined a generation of popular literature. Comments were generally kind, and her death notice, published on Anne’s Facebook page by Christopher, received 260,000 interactions from fans, and 113,000 shares.

“Wasn’t she an atheist?” my mother asked me.

“That’s what she said,” I replied. “But I don’t believe she ever was. I think Anne Rice was always a Christian believer.”