In her coverage of Anne Rice’s barking back at her Amazon critics, GalleyCat provided a link to the reader reviews Rice herself has contributed to Amazon. Notice anything?

Elsewhere, noir writer Ray Banks takes Rice to task. His rant (which is in some places a little noirish for my tastes, I’ll admit) includes choice snippets from Rice’s own website about her editing process:

“After the publication of the The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments. I resolved to hand in the manuscripts when they were finished. And asked that she accept them as they were. She was very reluctant, feeling that her input had value, but she agreed to my wishes. I asked this due to my highly critical relationship with my work and my intense evolutionary work on every sentence in the work, my feeling for the rhythm of the phrase and the unfolding of the plot and the character development. I felt that I could not bring to perfection what I saw unless I did it alone. In othe words, what I had to offer had to be offered in isolation. So all novels published after The Queen of the Damned were written by me in this pure fashion, my editor thereafter functioning as my mentor and guardian.”

Ooh, “mentor and guardian”! Can she be a light-bearer too? I think an editor should always have “light-bearer” in her description.

Sadly, of course, anyone who enjoyed the first few Rice books (as I did), and then wondered at the sharp drop off in quality right around, um, Queen of the Damned, will not be suprised by the admission that this was the same period during which Rice’s editor was relegated to the role of mentor, guardian and light-bearer. At the time, I blamed a rigorous publishing schedule, which had Rice producing a new book each year. Now I realize the problem was an acute attack of diva-itis.

Last note: I realize that when mentally picturing Anne Rice, my mind always conjures an image of Ayn Rand in Goth costume. Why?