The Rices of Rancho Mirage

The Desert Sun interviews Anne Rice and her son Christopher, who both live in Rancho Mirage.

"I do get people saying, 'How can you be such a fool to believe in God?' I sense many are young Goth kids who feel abandoned. I just say, look, you're looking for the same things that I was, transcendence and redemption. I found what my characters were looking for."

Rice may appear to have been playing in the shadows of life, not only with her homoerotic vampire novels, but also with her erotic fiction written under a pseudonym.

Rice is a curious kind of Christian. On the one hand, she is resolutely orthodox when it comes to scripture. She "loved" Gibson's controversial movie about Jesus' last hours, "The Passion of the Christ."

"Hollywood is furious because they don't know how to replicate his success, to cash in on the audience he revealed," she says. "But they can't do it. That movie was only a success because (Gibson) believes in Christ."

Rice says despite connections in Hollywood, there's as yet no interest in adapting her Christ books for the screen. "I think executives are just scared of the Christian audience, of jammed fax machines and pickets."

Unlike Gibson, however, Rice is decidedly progressive politically, a longtime Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter.

Rice's liberal politics also apply to hot-button church issues such as women in the clergy and homosexuality.

"I did wonder for a bit, 'How can I go back to a church that says my son will go to hell?' But in the end, I left it all in God's hands," she says."

The Desert Sun seems to have departed from its usual style and did not call Anne Rice a "Rancho Mirage literary figure," allowing her to continue to belong to the world.