This article originally appeared in the March 1994 issue of Esquire. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.It actually was a dark and stormy night. Angry thunderheads cloaked Houston’s Hobby International Airport, and flash-flood warnings were being broadcast on the radio. The forecast was for as much as ten inches of rain before the end of the day. As the limousine plowed through the downpour, the passengers recall, the water was rising almost midway on the door panels. The driver turned and asked Anne Rice if she had brought the foul weather with her. Rice—the author of Interview with the Vampire and a half-dozen best-selling novels about the demonic doings of witches, ghosts. and other unearthly creatures in a whole series of dark and stormy nights—could only smile. Lately, she has been accused of greater mischief than mucking with the heavens.Looking like a coiffed Morticia Addams, Rice was in Texas to promote her latest best-seller, Lasher, at Houston’s Crossroads Market & Bookstore. As her limo approached, a low rumble could be heard in the distance. At first it sounded like thunder. By the time the car rounded the last bend, though, Rice could clearly make out the rhythmic meter of chanting. Interview, published in 1976, is considered the greatest vampire novel to come along since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published almost a hundred years ago. Gathered outside the bookstore, nearly a thousand sodden groupies outfitted in galoshes and garbage bags, brandishing umbrellas and protest signs, were… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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