Anne Rice

City of R'lyeh

I have never been able to read Anne Rice. I actually cannot read her writing: it has nothing to do with what she is writing about, but it is the very techniques of her writing that I can not handle. I have tried three times with no luck, and there is nothing I could do to improve my case, so I let the books close after going through no more than six pages. (I have the same problem with a few other writers.)
Strange.
I can, however, easily read about Anne Rice, which I having been doing this cold afternoon:

Rice rediscovered James Frazer's The Golden Bough through Joseph Campbell's application of Frazer and Jung to myth... She had Lestat similarly recover the vampire's origins in the pre-Christian vegetation gods and Goddess worship; her vampires essentially perform a Druidic-Egyptian fertility ritual.

Interesting article; tells me nothing at all. Sweeps the veils of arcana before my eyes, but discovers to me not a whit of the old vampire actually. Every veil the Salome-vampire strips off is replaced by two new ones!
I think I read all of Joseph Campbell on Myth, and he bemoaned our lack of myth. If I'm not mistaking, his idea of myth was the writing of James Joyce. He would never have considered vampire stories as modern myths.
Modern myths, note! Not ancient myths, not stories about pre-Christian vegetation gods and the Mother Goddess. They had their day, and they are gone. We may have glimpses of them now and then, but just as slender twigs: the branches, trunk, and the roots are long gone. The notion that modern horrors find their beginning in the ardent faith of antiquity is just more of the same old nonsense of people who have no imagination themselves.

We have our myths of vampires and zombies, and their genesis is in uncontrollable desire. Unfortunately, their motivation is death. If you do not believe me, go see a horror flick. Uncontrollable desires have really been in the news recently: wars, speculation, bubbles, fundamentalist terrors... all in the news. We have our own gods, thank you. We have no need of the old gods of R'lyeh to explain our myths.

link to later posts:
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2011/02/anne-rice-psychology-of-vampires.html