BIG NEWS : Bestselling author Anne Rice reveals the inspiration of The Wolf Gift

Anne Rice’s legendary ‘Vampire Chronicles‘ immersed us in the mythology, lives and loves of a motley crew of undead; they defined a genre. And now she has another age-old story in her sights, the terrifying werewolf legend …

The werewolf is the classic monster of horror fiction — dark, gothic, with supernatural depth and power – but here it is reimagined and reinvented with all Anne Rice’s supernatural sympathy and inventiveness, as a romantic being, a potentially tragic figure bestowed with the gift of transformation and transcendence.

Only Anne Rice could make us wonder if it’s possible love a man-beast but, in The Wolf Gift‘s hero Reuben, we have a brand new hero for a brand new audience. The vampire is dead … 2012 is the year of the werewolf.

Now a word from the author herself, Anne Rice:

The wolf gift is the gift of becoming a werewolf in the novel.

This idea came about as I was watching several if not every werewolf film I could find when I was preparing to write the novel; and I noticed that, whenever someone was bitten and transformed into a werewolf, they frequently referred to that as a gift. Despite the fact that almost all of those films ended in tragedy with the werewolf being shot with a silver bullet because the gift also happened to transform into a curse, I continued to think that receiving the capacity to transform into a werewolf was not unlike receiving a gift—a gift of awesome power and magnificent beauty!

And I wanted to give that same opinion to Reuben, my hero in the book. He is the one who has and holds the idea that becoming a werewolf was not bad but good, not a curse but a gift.

Throughout the book as his opinion develops and expands about the wolf gift, he expresses for me my own thoughts and feelings about becoming a powerful humanoid animal capable of achieving incredible feats that not even a real wolf or a human being could do because that powerful humanoid animal is really a synthesis of man and wolf.

My hero is the core of being a werewolf: He is a Man-Wolf, a term developed by Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian in Hugues-le-loup or The Man Wolf. Similar to my development of the Dark Gift in the Vampire Chronicles, the Wolf Gift allowed me to create and enter into a new cosmology, a new universe, and a new world.

Anne Rice.

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Anne Rice is the author of many internationally bestselling books, most recently The Road to Egypt, the first volume in her life of Christ the Lord. She came to international fame for ‘The Vampire Chronicles’, which include Interview with the Vampire (filmed by Neil Jordan, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt), The Tale Of The Body Thief and the latest volume Blood Canticle. The musical Lestat, with music by Elton John, opened on Broadway in April 2006. Her other fiction includes the shorter vampire novels, Pandora and Vittorio the Vampire, as well as The Witching Hour, Lasher, The Mummy, The Feast Of All Saints and Cry To Heaven (soon to be a major film). She was born in New Orleans, where she lived for many years, and now lives in Palm Springs, California.

Anne Rice has sold over 100 million copies of her books to date.

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