Vampire novelist Anne Rice is laid to rest in New Orleans

Anne Rice, the New Orleans-born author of the beyond-popular 1976 novel “Interview with the Vampire” and several sequels, returned to her hometown Saturday afternoon.

Rice, who died Dec. 11 at age 80 in Rancho Mirage, California, where she’d lived for the past few years, was flown into Louis Armstrong International Airport. From there her remains were borne to Lake Lawn Funeral Home and Cemeteries, by hearse, attended by a motorcycle police escort.

The acclaimed queen of contemporary Gothic literature would later be placed in a stately, neoclassical crypt that was first built as the final resting place for her husband, the poet and artist Stan Rice, who died in 2002. A daughter, Michele Rice, who died of leukemia as a child in the 1970s, is also interred there.

A white tent was erected adjacent to the tomb, to protect the attendees of Anne Rice's private memorial ceremony from Saturday's wind and persistent rain. Urns on the steps of the tomb gushed with large white and pale-green bouquets.  

Rice’s son and fellow author, Chris Rice, answering questions by email via a publicist on the day before the funeral, said his mother’s burial ceremony would be accompanied by a violinist performing some of her favorite songs, including "Younger Than Springtime" and "Overhead the Moon is Beaming." The latter, he wrote, “is a classic Sigmund Romberg tune she used to sing to me as a lullaby as a child.”

Chris Rice said he accompanied his mother’s body on her final flight, with a handful of her staff, relatives and friends, including the author Eric Shaw Quinn.

Saturday’s service was intended for “the close family, where we could privately express our grief,” he said. But he assured his mother’s fans that “we're planning a very large public celebration of life in New Orleans later in the year,” one that will be “fun and loud and glittering and absolutely Anne.”

He attributed the delay of a celebratory Crescent City sendoff to the surging COVID-19 pandemic. “We're hoping that circumstances will allow more of the world to open up in the months ahead, and this will allow all our beloved covens from all over the time they need to gather,” he wrote.

The day before the funeral, three Rice fans arrived at the 150-year-old cemetery to behold her crypt. Terri Kelly of Phoenix momentarily choked up at the realization that the beloved author would soon be sealed behind its heavy metal gate.

“Rice has been a part of my life since I was 18,” said Kelly, who is now 52. When news reached her of Rice’s death, she mourned. Rice, she said, was among her pantheon of personal heroes, including Stephen King, Ozzy Osbourne and Clive Barker.

She said she makes pilgrimages to Rice sites every time she visits New Orleans. In the hours before the funeral, other Rice fans left small tributes at the entrance to the tomb, including a palmfull of pebbles, a ring, a photograph and a Carnival mask.

The weather was dreadful Saturday, with dramatic purple-gray skies, mist and occasional downpours. Anne Rice, who sometimes arrived at book signings in a coffin, might have considered the tearful atmosphere an enhancement.

Chris Rice, 43, said the last years of his mother’s life were an opportunity to become closer, both geographically - she moved from New Orleans to southern California to be nearer him - and emotionally. At the height of his mother’s success, he said, he had been a typical rebellious teen who took a “dismissive and anxious attitude” toward his parents, distancing himself from them.

But more recently, he and his illustrious mother became professional colleagues and business partners, even writing two novels together.

Rice's alluring antihero, Lestat, is among New Orleans' favorite fictional archetypes, right up there with Stanley Kowalski and Ignatius J. Reilly. Her tomb, on Lake Lawn's oak-lined Avenue Bell, stands amid other ornate burial chambers bearing real-life Crescent City icons with names such as Fertel, Schwegmann and Besthoff. At the end of the block lies Al Copeland, founder of the Popeyes Fried Chicken chain, with whom she once famously feuded.

Rice, for whom New Orleans architecture was sacred, bristled when Copeland opened a restaurant with a deliberately glitzy design at a St. Charles Avenue location that was a crucial locale in her Vampire Chronicles. She famously made her feelings known in 1997 via a full-page advertisement in The Times-Picayune. Copeland responded with a lawsuit that failed.

As irony would have it, the old adversaries are now neighbors.