From The Vampire Lestat to the Erotic Fairytale: Anne Rice’s Legacy

The Bothered Blog by Haven Valentin

June 2026

Photo Credit: AMC

It’s Pride month, and with the arrival of AMC’s much-awaited The Vampire Lestat (a.k.a. the third season of Interview with the Vampire, renamed for its second phase), fans of the show are returning to the books that inspired it all—myself included. Forget brat summer, forget hot girl summer: this is the summer of the goths.

As a writer of fiction that blends erotica with horror (affectionately dubbed horrotica), I owe a great debt to the Gothic literary icon that was Anne Rice. Without her, the vampire genre would not exist as we currently know it, and nor would the darker erotic fiction scene.

Who was Anne Rice?

When Rice came onto the scene in 1976 with her debut novel, Interview with the Vampire, she injected new life into the vampire by asking the question: what if we heard the vampire’s side of the story? This reframing of the vampire paved the way for virtually all subsequent vampire media featuring angsty, sympathetic vampires, from Buffy to Twilight to The Vampire Diaries. More than that, the book was an ornate and sumptuous love-letter to the Gothic, each page dripping with self-indulgent, maximalist prose. Not one to shy away from difficult topics, Interview handled themes of queerness, religion, mortality and murder, and it did so with stylistic aplomb.

The show has gained widespread acclaim for—among other novel changes—taking the queer subtext from Rice’s work and granting it the freedom to be text. I, personally, am a great fan of those changes: I think they lend the work new depth, and a breath of fresh, contemporary air. But without the foundation of Rice’s work to stand on, there would be no AMC adaptation of Interview With The Vampire, and so—whether you love her or hate her—the queer horror fans of the world have got to hand it to her: she! did! that!

Though Interview saw only meagre success with its hardback release, the paperback became a swift bestseller, and was followed by many sequels, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles. As of February 2008, the novel had sold 8 million copies worldwide. Rice continued to revisit this story-world across the whole span of her career, publishing its final installment—Blood Communion: A Tale of Prince Lestat—in 2018.

Looking Beyond the Vampires: the Sleeping Beauty Quartet

While it’s indisputable to say that The Vampire Chronicles is what Anne Rice is best known and remembered for, she also wrote a number of other sensual Gothic works which are worth a reappraisal. Notable to me—as a writer of horrorotica—is The Sleeping Beauty Quartet: a four-book series of dark, boundary-pushing erotic fantasy Rice wrote and published under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure. (For context, the roquelaure was a type of silk-lined cloak popular in 18^th century France.)

The first book in the quartet—The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty—reimagines the Sleeping Beauty fairytale as a queer, sadomasochistic adventure, in which the newly-awoken Beauty travels across the land to a new castle and learns to serve her Prince and other members of the royal court. It features copious spanking scenes, heavy D/s dynamics, sexual humiliation, pony play and oh, did I mention spanking scenes? (I’m not kidding: there are so many spanking scenes.)

When I read the first book, I was shocked by how openly Rice wrote scenes of dubious consent: a taboo choice many erotic writers still hesitate over today. The opening scene, for example, features the Prince waking Beauty not with a kiss but with penetrative sex—which in the real world would be considered assault (and rightly so). In order to indulge in the fantasy of the Quartet, the reader must break the usual author-reader contract of suspension of disbelief—the contract which says, pretend this is all real—and instead be utterly cognizant of the fact that they are reading a story: that the proceedings are all imaginary and no actual people are being harmed. The Quartet characters, to Rice, existed only as objects of fantasy, and the reader’s consent—which could be revoked at any time by closing the book—was the only consent that truly mattered to her.

With this in mind, Rice’s editor at Knopf refused to publish the books—deeming them too dark for their milieu—and recommended she sell them to another house, E. P. Dutton, which accepted them. Despite her use of a pseudonym, Rice was never ashamed to admit to having written the Quartet, claiming that the only person she didn’t want to know that she had written them was her father—and that, after talking to him about it, she no longer worried about that either. She often referred to the Quartet, not only as erotica, but also as her “pornography”—a word modern writers now have mixed feelings about, often preferring to call their work “erotica” or “smut.”

Whatever you want to call it, one fact is undeniable: Rice’s work laid the foundations for women writing erotic fantasy. Without her, the genre would look incredibly different today.

Rice’s Legacy: Women’s Right to Fantasize

Undaunted in the face of controversy, Rice was a fierce defender of women’s rights to enjoy the erotic. In her 1993 interview with Playboy, she stated, “I believe absolutely in the right of women to fantasize what they want to fantasize, to read what they want to read. I would go to the Supreme Court to fight for the right of a little woman in a trailer park to read pornography—write it, if she wants to. I think one of the worst turns feminism took was its puritanical turn, where it tried to tell women what was politically correct sexually.”

“We must support and empower women without imposing new rules on them,” she went on to say in her 2017 interview with Nerdist—holding firm on her stance more than twenty years later! “We must recognize that women are people, not concepts in anyone’s belief system. We women must not seek to be protected so much as to be treated with respect as equals.”

This was a controversial take in 1993 and it’s only grown more poignant, as censorship of adult content online grows increasingly rapacious in this era of the internet. Despite what many saw as the golden age of erotica in the mid-2010s (following the success of Fifty Shades), and the proliferation of smutty romance novels on BookTok, in recent years there has been a crackdown on erotic content online. Words are being censored on social media—see: “seggs” instead of “sex”—by individual users seeking to pre-emptively protect themselves from algorithmic suppression. Payment processors, such as PayPal, MasterCard and Stripe, are forbidding digital marketplaces from hosting entirely-legal content that is sexual in nature (with self-published and indie content being hit the hardest). A recent example is Kickstarter, who instituted harsh penalties for writers of adult work, then rolled back the policy following significant backlash. It’s a strange and anxiety-inducing time to be a writer of erotic work, especially given the progress we’ve made for women’s rights over the past 50 years, and I often wonder what Anne Rice would make of it.

While that’s a question which can never be answered—as we sadly lost Rice in December 2021—we do know how she responded to criticism of the Quartet in her lifetime.

“I remember a very aggressive and unpleasant letter from a self-styled feminist telling me to stop with the Roquelaure novels,” Rice told Nerdist. “She was horrified and offended that I would present women enjoying S&M. Feminism to me means supporting the right of women to do what they want, and that includes writing S&M pornography if they want, or doing the kind of erotica that Madonna did. True feminism supports the individuality and freedom of women.”

She went on to say, “I love seeing all the erotica written by and for women and by and for gays. [2017] is a great time to be a writer, and in no small part because of feminism.”

It’s my sincere hope that the pendulum swings back in favor of women’s sexual freedom, and that more writers feel comfortable exploring the dark and messy facets of sexuality in their work. Anne Rice has left us with her example, and it’s our turn to take up the torch: to write bold, innovative and utterly delectable stories.

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About the Author

Haven Valentin (she/her/it/its) is a queer horror-erotica writer and lover of all things complex, Gothic and kinky. Her writing has previously appeared in Wet Screams: A Monsterfucker Anthology (Little Ghosts Press, 2025). She is currently working on her first novel.