"I'm the opposite of a careful writer or a blocked writer. I seem to be in a perpetual state of mania!" Anne Rice told me during a recent telephone interview, speaking of the creative force that has produced twelve successful novels for her over the past sixteen years. Her thirteenth book, The Tale of the Body Thief, hit the stands in time for Halloween and is already garnering enthusiastic reviews.

Despite past successes in non-supernatural fiction such as Belinda and Cry to Heaven Rice believes she's found her true voice with the supernatural.

"At this point not only am I obsessed and enthralled by the supernatural, but I find I'm able to get an intensity in that framework that I don't get otherwise. I think the Rampling novels (a pen name) are a good example. Belinda was a novel that was terribly important to me but I just was not able to make as intense a connection with the audience with that book. . . And also I love supernatural fiction! I don't think there's any limit to what you can do with it. We're seeing an age where all kinds of rules are being thrown out the window. We have to remind ourselves of "MacBeth" and "Hamlet" and Turn of the Screw and of Faust. Supernatural fiction has no roof over it; it doesn't have to be "B fiction", it doesn't have to entertainment or escapism. When people look back on this age I hope they'll give these novels a fair chance along with the realism."

Since the publication of Interview with the Vampire in 1976 Anne Rice has done more for the public image of that venerable monster than any writer to date. Mouldy nosferatu are strictly passé in Rice's cosmology. Her vampires are a dashing, tormented, romantic race of outcasts who live by their own rigid ethical code. They narrate their own tales from their own perspective, making it seductively easy to forget that they are dangerous predators.

"As you can see, it fascinates me, the idea confessing to the reader at one moment 'This is evil and I'm making it look glamorous. Don't you understand?"' Rice explained. "That's kind of what Body Thief is about. It's really a comment on all four Chronicles.... Something in me emerged from the writing of Body Thief knowing a little bit more about ruthlessness."

Rice gladly claims main vampire Lestat as her present alter ego, although she originally identified with Lestat's melancholy creation and companion Louis, narrator of Interview.

"By the time I wrote The Vampire Lestat I was a changed person," Rice reflects. "And there was an attempt to become another person, maybe even by becoming Lestat. Before that I was certainly the more grief-striken, passive person that Louis was in the first book. . . I think Interview was a lament for a lost past, maybe my lament for a lost Catholicism, a lost child, and a lost New Orleans. . . But I think they're both still two sides of the same personality"

Rice had intended for Body Thief to be the last of the Chronicles but her characters had other ideas.

"When I first finished the fourth book I thought 'Never again, this is it!' But within days, days ,things were coming to me about another metaphysical adventure, something Lestat would get to do that would carry him further in his questions about eternal life and the cause of things. And I've now surrendered to the idea that it's going to be a huge work that's probably going to have twelve units and that each unit will be readable or accessible on its own. I'm no longer even thinking in terms of prequels or sequels. I've decided those words belong to Hollywood and New York. I just see it as one great work and I'll keep working on it as long as it keeps absolutely possessing me and enthralling me."

Lestat may have to wait awhile, however. Having just completed the sequel to the The Witching Hour, Rice is anxious begin work on another non-vampire novel. "I want to do another book first about a man and ghost," said Rice, "I want to do that very, very badly and I'm going to make Lestat wait if I have to punch him out. It's like shoving someone back into the closet. In a way he could take over my brain and every book could be a Lestat book. But I want to do these other things and I don't necessarily want him to be at every party I give. But I can feel already that something new is building and that's exciting!"