The Gospel According to the Goth
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

To everyone but her fans – and probably to many of them – Anne Rice has been a faintly pitiful figure. Her name – “think Anne Rice”- telegraphs everything that is embarassing about the gothic.
Ms. Rice might have devoted her career to Jesus purely for aesthetic reasons: She found a character not so Halloweenish as a vampire but still destined to visions and violence. Ms. Rice has announced personal reasons for this turn in her career, however. She returned to the Roman Catholic Church in 1998, and at a certain point, she said in an interview with Newsweek, “I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.”
The fruit of this resolution, “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” (Alfred A. Knopf, 322 pages, $25.95) does not read as a devotional text. Its opening scene, in which a 7-year-old Jesus inadvertantly kills a young bully, is ridiculous. Though derived from apocrypha, this scene has potboiler written all over it. It will hardly please readers who take Jesus Christ seriously.
In her afterword to “Out of Egypt,” Ms. Rice speaks of the point at which she decided to make Jesus her narrator: “I was ready to do violence to my career. I wanted to write the book in the first person. Nothing else mattered. I consecrated the book to Christ.”
For Ms. Rice to suppose that she has sacrificed herself for this, a basically wooden book that arrogates red-letter rights to itself, is self-important. It is one thing to return to your church; it is another thing for Anne Rice to decide that Jesus needs the Anne Rice treatment.
“Out of Egypt” will hardly do violence to her career. It is sensational – with the occasional cameo by the devil to titillate her fans. There are practical reasons why the devil always gets the best lines; he is traditionally a trickster among straight men. But about the best line Ms. Rice can give him is “I’m watching you, angel child!”
There will be more from this character – Ms. Rice plans a tetralogy for Jesus, of which “Out of Egypt” concerns only his childhood. The meat of this volume is Jesus’s dawning self-awareness. For too long, he cannot put two and two together. “Oh, how long would it be before I knew these things!” he cries, typically. The question of Jesus’s divinity informs this plot: Would the Son of God know himself as such, at 7?
Ms. Rice reduces this to a question of tabloid emotionalism: After Jesus’s birth, King Herod slaughtered all Jewish children under the age of two. Hence the original flight to Egypt. Will Jesus learn of this terrible truth? Will others blame him for it? The story of Jesus’s three-day-long tarry with the elders of the temple – the only Biblical anecdote we have of Jesus’s youth – becomes in Ms. Rice’s hands a fever dream, induced by Jesus’s discovery of these bloody circumstances.
“Out of Egypt” is not worthless; it is essentially a portrayal of goodness, in which a self-effacing Joseph often steals the show. But the value of a novel like Ms. Rice’s depends on its difference with the Gospels: what has her voice added?
“The Da Vinci Code” has permanently reminded us that the thrill in thrillers is an intellectual phenomenon – it is the hectic glossing of irresolvables, the thrill of careless conclusion. So to the Gospels, Ms. Rice contributes the tricks of her trade: a neat plot, with chilling apprehensions set up for the reader’s narrow pleasures.
Young Jesus is seen taking up with Joseph Caiaphas, who, many readers will remember, will eventually condemn Jesus, handing him over to Pilate. This carries the same frisson as seeing Darth Vader build C-3PO in the Star Wars prequels – it is a cheap sort of dramatic irony meant to flatter nerds and fanatics, making storytelling a solemn game of connect-the-dots.
“Out of Egypt” is not insidious, like the manipulative “Left Behind” series; nor does it represent a concerted sectarian effort, like Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.” Nor is it wastefully provocative, like “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Among recent retellings, it perhaps most resembles Norman Mailer’s “The Gospel According to the Son,” in that both put words in Jesus’s mouth, and in both cases Jesus sounds strikingly like any character the author would create.
In Ms. Rice’s case, that character is limited by his age, but also by the expedience of gothic thrills. His character is underwritten, simplistically passionate, long on research, and short on writerly care. “Out of Egypt” will be received not as a break with the vampires, but as a canny turn on old themes. The real gothic period was deeply Christian. And Vampires always had to do with crucifixes, resurrection, wooden stakes, and holy water. Ms. Rice is to be commended, at least, for seeking the story behind her stories.