You see, while some people are very much excited for a new show about our pompous king of the assholes (and I say this as a term of endearment, having loved Lestat since I was a depressed teenager living in New York, shuffling through my mom’s fiction section) we need to pause and remember this:
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
Read it again, slowly.
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
This is difficult for younger fans to understand, but let’s take a walk down memory lane.
She has threatened to sue writers in the past. She is one of the most prolific writers of our generation, and she does not support people using her characters for their own work.
In fact, in 2000 she went on a binge-attack against her fans. She threatened legal action against fans who wrote or drew her characters, but especially those who wrote with them. She sent them weeks of harassing letters and doxxed them on the internet.
Let me repeat that.
She doxxed people who wrote fan fiction.
She harassed them online and threatened to contact employers.
She used her fans to outright attack other fans.
This isn’t even something she can just shake off now, with the comment of “It was so long ago” because she did this to a writer who wrote commentary on her story in 2013.
In 2013.
While it was not that she wrote fan fiction, she still shows that she has no respect for people who are in fandom.
Remember those disclaimers used in fan fics, at the beginning? “I do not own …. ”? Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Anne Rice and others like her would attack fandoms and threaten them, and was in hopes that they would just leave us alone. She didn’t.
In short: Do not trust Anne Rice. I love her writing, I have read every book she has even written, but I do not trust her.
You shouldn’t, either.
Anne Rice was and still is a bully. Don’t support her work.
She’s been like this since Geocities was the big place to have spec (that’s what fics used to be called, specs, as in speculative fiction) pages back in the mid 90s.
She use to threaten to sue anyone she found posting specs anywhere, and there was a whole underground network of people to share specs and fan art (which she also would threaten to sue over).
Anne Rice has always been kind of a twat about fan works based on her mediocre writing.
She’s harassed people quite recently. @jennytrout Wanna gossip?
What was that? “Raise your hand if you were ever personally victimized by Anne Rice?”
DISCLAIMER: this is not about fanfic, but it is about what she can do to you.
So, I totally idolized Anne Rice. Fully and adoringly so. One day, she shared one of my HuffPo articles with her “people of the page” and it was probably the greatest day of my entire career.
But she has this thing where she’s OBSESSED with bad reviews. At one point, she complained about a bad review she got for Interview from the New York Times or some such thing like forty years ago. She used it as an example of how reviews can hurt authors. I was like, seriously, lady, you have how many millions of copies of your books sold? How many movies have been made from them? *People try to find your house to take pictures of themselves in front of it.* But okay, everybody has their quirks. I just kind of rolled my eyes over it.
Not long after that, she made a post about this website that was made by a writer who apparently wasn’t getting the sales numbers or accolades they so richly deserved. The problem wasn’t like, the nature of the business or anything, nay, my friends, nay, but the fact that people–BULLIES!–left mean reviews on Amazon. So these people whom Rice so admired would make posts where they would reveal Amazon/GoodReads reviewers names and home addresses and such. One post even mentioned something like, “Between this time and that time every weekday, they go for a walk by the sea wall.” Scary, scary shit. And Rice LOVED these people.
I don’t know why I took it upon myself to argue with her. I really don’t. Maybe because I respected her so much and her support of the site was so disappointing? This was the result.
So, I’m a bully. Big whoop, right? And my feelings were a little hurt, but hey, never meet (or follow on social media) your idols, right? Lesson learned, and it wasn’t like this could destroy my fond memories of how much I loved her books, right?
So, fast forward, I think it was the next year, or at least a few months later, when I wrote a post about a dumb $0.99 Kindle book about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in a BDSM relationship. A pathetic little troll with too much hair gel and not enough parenting ran to his goddess Anne Rice to tell her how mean, mean, mean I was being. She posted a link to a blog post made about me on the reviews-are-bullies site and said something to the effect of someone needing to teach me a lesson or someone needed to show me how it feels or something like that. To THREE. MILLION. PEOPLE.
As a fan of Anne Rice, I am confident in stating that many of her fans are not okay people. And they heeded the command of their “queen.” Yes, they referred to her as such, flooding me with emails, tweets, FB messages, anywhere they could reach me. They posted my address, screenshots of google earth images of my house, they threatened to kill me, they made graphic threats against my children, one charming gentleman on parole from his assault sentence offered to make a necklace of my teeth to present to “my queen.”
When confronted about the fact that she had unleashed all of this on me, her response was basically: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
She insisted she hadn’t done anything wrong, she couldn’t control what people were doing, and oh yes, it’s terrible that people are saying this, but she NEVER. ASKED. THEM. TO. STOP. In fact, she joined her “people of the page” in mocking my appearance, mourning the horrible lives my children must have, and continuing to insist that my “prison tats” indicated that I was a member of a gang (I have “TIME LADY” tattooed across my knuckles in the 11th Doctor era Doctor Who font). Egging them on with this coy, “Well, we shouldn’t say things like that, we’re better than that, BUT” bullshit.
This all went on for weeks. Some of these people still occasionally pop up to threaten/antagonize. So, yeah. Steer clear. She holds a grudge, she can and will mobilize her fanbase against you, if she dislikes you she will ruin you, and she doesn’t care if her readers literally kill you.
