Master of horror goes after Jesus

Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt Anne Rice. Knopf, 2005. 368 pages.

So what’s a master of Gothic horror doing writing a novel about Jesus? Anne Rice has built a career on the image of the vampire. And while we probably won’t want to venture into the darkness of that genre, her latest novel reflects a huge change in her life: an encounter with Jesus – an encounter that Rice herself details in an amazing epilogue to the novel itself.

Rice was raised Catholic, but left the faith as a young adult and married a “passionate atheist.” When her husband died of cancer in 2002, she began a new spiritual search, a search that led her back to the Roman Catholic faith and a living relationship with Christ. As a result, she has turned her writing skills to a new sort of character: her Lord and Saviour.

Nevertheless, Out of Egypt shares some significant continuity with her earlier writing. Rice is a master of historical fiction, and this novel is well informed about the political and religious climate of first-century Jewish life. More to the point: this is a story told about a supernatural character resident among us, one who doesn’t quite fit, one who has a dark and troubling secret in his past.

And there is a lot of blood. Rice makes the point that Roman occupation of Judea was often a bloody affair – and so was temple sacrifice. The young Jesus is shaped by these powerful and troubling experiences, and they prod him to come to terms with his divinely shaped identity and mission.

The story is told from the perspective of the child-aged Jesus. It’s clear from the beginning that this is fiction. The opening scene, a take-off on ancient legends about the childhood Jesus, announces that loudly. The dynamics of Jesus’ large, blended refugee family (Rice makes quite plausible the Catholic teaching that Jesus’ “brothers” were in fact cousins) feel quite true to life, particularly when one compares them to the stories and secrets that continue to emerge out of the Mennonite refugee experience of the Russian revolution and its aftermath.

Out of Egypt is worthwhile reading, particularly during the Christmas season. It forces us to reflect on the more troubling side of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus. Can we, should we, celebrate Christmas with our ears deaf to the pain and bloodshed filling the world today? Anne Rice, specialist in horror and now a follower of God, asks us to consider again the nature of the incarnation: what it means that God became flesh; flesh that was “obedient unto death, even death on a cross.”

Randy Klassen teaches literature and faith at Bethany College, Hepburn, Sask. He is looking forward to Rice’s next novel, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, due to be published next spring.