MORE ON ANNE RICE and her Jesus book from Beliefnet:

Anne Rice: 'Stations on a Journey'
The best-selling author gives up writing about vampires to write about the 'ultimate supernatural hero'--Jesus Christ.
By Marcia Z. Nelson
Anne Rice has nailed her vampire novels into a coffin.

"I will never write those kind of books again -- never," Rice said, referring to three decades of work that include bestsellers like "Interview with the Vampire" and other books in the Vampire Chronicles series.

That's a bummer, because it means we'll probably never see the resolution of that wild cliffhanger at the end of Taltos. But this seems to confirm my fear at the time I read it that she had written herself into a corner she couldn't get out of.

Her books about witches and dark angels, she said, "were reflections of a world that didn't include redemption."

Actually, I recall quite a bit of redemption in Memnoch the Devil, even if God didn't seem overly enthusiastic about the idea.

Then, near the end of the piece:

In the end, Rice seems to consider her new book a gift, both to Christians and to non-Christian fans of her previous work. "This is a book I offer to all Christians," she writes, "to the fundamentalists, to the Roman Catholics, to the most liberal Christians in the hope that my embrace of more conservative doctrines will have some coherence for them in the here and now of the book...

"I offer this book to those who know nothing of Jesus Christ in the hope that you will see him in these pages in some form. I offer this novel with love to my readers who've followed me through one strange turn after another in the hope that Jesus will be as real to you as any other character I've ever launched into the world we share."

The ellipsis is in the article. It will be very interesting to see how all of these readers react to this new book.

The article also describes her faith journey from and back to the Catholic Church and looks a bit at her view of New Testament scholarship.