P L U S: Grimm's grimmest The most hideous kids' story ever Pagan parents Halloween, an evening of family values

BY JOE FOWST | What a terrible night I endured! "Terrible" in an old-fashioned, purple-prose sense. "Terrible" like a ghost story. What happened to me was that the terrible apparition of Anne Rice, wrapped in a black cape and cowl, appeared at the foot of my bed just before dawn. She was there in the flesh -- no vaporous visitation -- but the woman was only 50 percent present. Rice has the Mayfair witches' power of "bilocation" -- the ability to be in two places at once. The first Anne Rice was probably asleep in her New Orleans compound, while her Manhattan double glared down at me, pinching a little blue data disk in her outstretched hand. Although I could not read the disk label, I intuitively knew it was mine. It contained the essay I'd just finished, "In Defense of Anne Rice." "How dare you write such viciousness!" the woman shouted, her voice chilling, her presence confusing. Why was she here? Rice claims that critics are the true vampires and refuses to even stake out our hearts. But then, my essay was a defense of the woman, for Christ's sake. Of course, I did point out that most of Rice's oeuvre is unreadable. Her characters speak like literate Saturday morning cartoons, while her descriptive paragraphs are like the coloring books of a child who only owns purple crayons. (I didn't mention Rice's addiction to run-on sentences.) That said, I praised three of her books to the sky: "Interview With the Vampire," "The Vampire Lestat" and "Memnoch the Devil." I claimed these vampire titles were three of the most interesting novels of the 20th century. And what genre better marks our age? Hitler was a vampire. Stalin, too. Certainly Ronald Reagan hung upside from the White House ceiling in the dead of night. As for fictional vampires, Anne Rice reinvented the genre, making Bram Stoker nothing more than a footnote. Readers who don't care a fig for the undead must still appreciate that "Interview" is brilliantly constructed -- a novel-long monologue, a dialogue with quotes within quotes, that never lags or distracts. As for "The Vampire Lestat," I still remember when that handsome book came out in 1985. I had never read Rice before, but I bought it on impulse at St. Marks Book Shop during a time when I couldn't afford hardcovers. I carried it home and whipped through its pages in a single weekend, delighting in Rice's operatic vampire mythology/history. She was like a user-friendly Thomas Pynchon. In my essay, I didn't rave quite this enthusiastically about "Memnoch." Sentence-by-sentence, the book is slight, but Rice takes the theology of the vampire novel to its ultimate conclusion: Lestat, her star vampire, literally drinks the blood of our redeemer, Jesus Christ. What novelist -- let alone a Catholic one -- would have the courage to write such a book, knowing it will surely damn her to hell? N E X T_P A G E_| The offer she couldn't refuse: No rewrite!