In a telephone interview from her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

It’s Halloween, and Anne Rice has a new book — a memoir in fact — that’s climbing best-seller lists. Everything is normal, then. Normal if it were 1994 — the height of Rice’s megaselling fame as a queen of Southern Gothic pulp. For those who haven’t been paying attention lately to vampire lit, America’s most famous chronicler of bloodsuckers doesn’t live in New Orleans anymore — and hasn’t since before Hurricane Katrina hit — and she’s riding new waves of enthusiasm: the memoir and Christian lit. Her memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession,” is the latest piece of evidence that Rice is reinventing herself in an attempt to build a reputation as a serious Christian writer. In the memoir, the 67-year-old writer doesn’t disavow the two decades she spent churning out books on vampires, demons and witches — with a batch of S&M erotica thrown in — following the breakout success of her first novel in 1976, “Interview With the Vampire.” “To be able to take the tools, the apprenticeship, whatever I learned from being a vampire writer, or whatever I was — to be able to take those tools now and put them in the service of God is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful opportunity,” she said. “And I hope I can redeem myself in that way. I hope that the Lord will accept the books I am writing now.” “I do think that those dark books were always talking about religion in their own way. They were talking about the grief for a lost faith,” she said. “My objective is simple: It’s to write books about our Lord living on Earth that make him real to people who don’t believe in him; or people who have never really tried to believe in him,” she said. She pressed the point: “I mean, I’ve made vampires believable to grown women. Now, if I can do that, I can make our Lord Jesus Christ believable to people who’ve never believed in him. I hope and pray.” Click here for Anne Rice

Called Out Of Darkness: Part 1: An Anne Rice Memoir

Called Out Of Darkness: Part 1: An Anne Rice Memoir