Phone Message Transcript: May 28, 2000
[appearing on Anne's fan phone line]

"If I get cut off - remember that you can still leave me a message. Just wait until the beep sounds and then talk. I always get all of your messages. It is May 28th, it is a Sunday, year 2000. It is beautiful here in New Orleans with an incredible blue sky and white clouds. The Crepe Myrtle trees are coming into bloom all over town. Some of them not quite yet, but a lot of them with gorgeous red blossoms and some with white blossoms and they are really, really beautiful. They seem to thrive in the heat. We still have the Oleanders too, everywhere, and it is really, really quite wonderful. In my garden, the Hibiscus are blooming too, and they are beautiful.

I want to thank you all for your messages and say hello to everybody. I don't have any more news on the QUEEN OF THE DAMNED out in Hollywood. I don't know what is going on. If you know anything about it, be sure to leave me a message because I'd like to know. We do search the Web for information on it and we haven't found very much.

The other property that I mentioned, that is being developed in Hollywood, is my book FEAST OF ALL SAINTS. It is being developed by SHOWTIME and I think that they are going to do a wonderful job on it. I am in contact with them by phone all of the time and they are very, very responsive and conscientious and want very much for the book to be translated into a beautiful mini-series. I think we may just see it broadcast in the year 2001.

The other thing that I wanted to talk about is that I have been re-reading two books that are my favorites. They have been very, very inspiring to me as a writer. They are WUTHERING HEIGHTS, by Emily Bronte and JANE EYRE, by Charlotte Bronte. I know that I have talked to you all before about the Bronte sisters and how much I identify with them. They lived in the 1800's in the lonely parts of the Moores of Yorkshire in England. They wrote two of the most seminal and important books for those of us who write from the imagination. And I would love to hear your comments on what you think if you have read WUTHERING HEIGHTS. If you haven't, by all means read it. You can probably find it in any big book store in the country in a paperback edition and you can find JANE EYRE, too. They are really classics that have been disseminate throughout the world. Get a hold of them and read them. If you respond to anything in my work, you are going to love these two books. They may not be as easy to read as you might like, but they are worth it.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS is so eccentric and so powerful. It is so brutal and so poetic. It is just absolutely a masterpiece. As soon as I finished reading it the other night, I started right up reading it again and I am just reading through it now, more slowly, just amazed at the techniques Emily Bronte uses to tell her story. She uses two narrators who witness what the characters do and I am not sure that I have ever done that in my writing and I would love to try it. She uses a housekeeper named Mrs. Dean and a tenant on the property named Mr. Lockwood. Between them, they tell the story of the great love between Cathy and Heathcliff. I think that everyone knows from the wonderful black and white movie by William Wilder, and from other productions that have been done by HBO and maybe by BBC. I recently saw one in which Timothy Dalton was Heathcliff and he was marvelous, just marvelous in the role. But anyway, I recommend that you get these two books and if you know anything about them, if you have any opinions, tell me what you think. Tell me especially, if you think that one is stronger than the other. It is sort of a controversy in literary criticism about them. People sort of say that they think that WUTHERING HEIGHTS is better than JANE EYRE. I am not entirely sure that's true. The great story in Jayne Eyre of the young governess going to that mysterious house of Thornfield, falling in love with the mysterious Mr. Rochester and then the secret of the mad woman in the attic. That has become an archetype for many, many hundreds of novels and I think to just say that it is not a great book, it's not as great as WUTHERING HEIGHTS is too dismissing.

Anyway, I would love to hear your opinions of it. Again, my book MERRICK, is one of the vampire chronicles and it will be published on October 17, 2000. We are going to have a huge book signing down here. We are going to hold it on that day, October 17, and I think that the books will come through Britton Trice's Garden District Bookstore. He will be the one who supplies the books and sells tickets to the signing. This is not a ticket you pay for, it is just that when you buy a book, you get a ticket that guarantees that your book will be signed. We will plan to be there for 8 hours and that means that we can do about, oh my goodness, I don't know, about 480 people. So, there will be about 480 tickets that guarantee that you will get your book signed and we will do it at St. Elizabeth's Orphanage so that people have comfortable places to sit and roam around and view what we have at the Orphanage. You know, it is a wonderful exhibit of Stan's paintings, my husband's paintings, and also my huge doll collection.

Anyway, that is all for now. Leave me a message please. I love you very much. Take care.

Anne Rice"