Some times people in general, and more specifically artists, reach a point in their lives where it's God or bust. People can find themselves in a place where the only way to cope with addiction, or personal problems, is to find religion. No matter where you stand on faith, there's no doubt that for some faith is what saved their lives. Which is good for them. The one problem is that following such a crisis and conversion artists generally take a turn for the inferior.

It may be that the newfound faith becomes such an overwhelming part of their existence that it pushes aside doubt, internal conflict and all the things that usually goes into great art. And it may be that in embracing the new the artist is forced to repudiate a lot of the qualities of themselves that made them artists in the first place. There are of course exceptions to this rule of thumb, TS Eliot being among them.

Now noone would claim that Anne Rice, the author of such novels as "Interview with the Vampire" is one of the great writers of our time. But the first books of the "Vampire Chronicles" were solid entertainment and a fresh and influential take on the vampire myth.

One of the interesting things about her vampire mythology was that it really dispensed with a great deal of the supernatural and religious elements that had always been such a staple of the genre alltogether. Vampires were not the product of a curse from Heaven or Hell. Crucifixes and holy water were nothing but ornaments and tepid H₂O. Vampires were very much a part of the natural world and had moral dilemmas and internal conflicts of their own to battle with.

That changed in the fifth book of the series, "Memnoch The Devil", in which christianity, allbeit still of a rather unorthodox kind, suddenly moved front and center. It is also, in my opinion, when the whole thing started going artistically pear shaped. Characters stopped acting and started acting out a script laid down by higher powers, and indeed began acting totally out of character.

It is well know that Rice has had her share of misfortune; the loss of a child, alcoholism and ill health, and recently the loss of her husband, the poet Stan Rice. It is not surprising then that she sought solace in the Catholic Church she had left behind as a young woman. Now, according to an interview with Newsweek, she has left vampires, witches and things that go bump in the night, in the gothic and carnal sense, behind and will now "write only for the Lord."

"For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.
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Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."

To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship—some of which she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it—or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.

PS! The main character has his say on the matter at Something Positive.