When Anne Rice died on Dec. 11, 2021, something even bigger died with her. At the age of 80, the literary superstar was more than just the author of the bestselling Vampire Chronicles series of gothic novels—she was an integral part of American culture and, for many readers, the first writer they fell in love with, the one who showed them the power of books, who taught them there’s nothing wrong with being weird.

Tributes to Rice would pour in over the next few days, but none were as poignant as the one from her son, novelist Christopher Rice, who announced her death on social media.

“As my mother, her support for me was unconditional—she taught me to embrace my dreams, reject conformity and challenge the dark voices of fear and self-doubt,” he wrote. “As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions.”

In an interview with Kirkus conducted a little more than a month after his mother’s death, Christopher says that his grief comes and goes in waves. It’s hard for him to forget, of course—not only is Anne’s passing still fresh in his mind, but his second collaboration with her, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris (Anchor, Feb. 1), is hitting bookstore shelves.

“My mother and I were very close,” says Christopher, who is 43. “I’m not married. I don’t have a husband. And so my relationship with her—which continued into adulthood, because we worked together, it wasn’t like we drifted apart. The older I got, the closer we seemed to come together—the extent to which she has threaded through my life and my memories is not something that I was quite prepared for.”

Anne’s readers weren’t prepared for her loss, either. The author made her literary debut in 1976 with Interview With the Vampire, but after the publication of The Queen of the Damned in 1988, she became a citywide superstar in New Orleans, where she and her family lived, and a bona fide literary celebrity all across the country. Christopher remembers witnessing his mother’s sudden rise to fame.

“I would go with her to the book signings, and I would see the people lined up for hours in the rain and in the snow,” Christopher recalls. “The other thing is—I came to learn this later in life as a writer myself—it’s not very often that you see writers on television. So the fact that she was always on television throughout my high school [years], being interviewed on talk shows, that brought home that she was a really big deal. Someone in the house would say, ‘Your mom’s going to be on the Late Show tonight,’ or ‘Your mom’s going to be on Rosie O’Donnell again.’ That was really a reminder that her celebrity had almost transcended the books themselves.”

[Christopher Rice recommends five essential books by Anne Rice.]

Her fans were legion, and many of them happened to be LGBTQ+. After her death, readers reflected on the role she assumed as a writer whose novels young queer people identified with, often strongly. (In 2020, Christopher responded to a prompt on Twitter that read, “tell me you’re gay without telling me you’re gay” with the comment, “I’m Anne Rice’s son.”)

“At the time [the Vampire Chronicles] books came out, somebody told her Interview With the Vampire was the greatest gay allegory he’d ever read,” Christopher recalls. “That was not intentional on her part, but she was writing these outsider perspectives on these subjects that were considered taboo. And she was also writing what it feels like to live with constant guilt and shame. I think anytime a writer is able to go into the point of view of a character who has previously been dismissed as the monster, I think queer people are going to react positively. If you illuminate depth and nuance and emotional intelligence in the monster when you go into their point of view, we’ll react positively, because we’ve all been called monsters by various people.”

Christopher addressed gay themes in his fiction debut, A Density of Souls, published in 2000, which he wrote while taking care of his mother, who was recovering from a bout of diabetic ketoacidosis that nearly killed her. He would go on to write several thrillers and romance novels, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that he decided to collaborate on a book with his mother, who had been urging him for years to write a screenplay based on her 1989 book, The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned. Christopher wasn’t interested, so Anne proposed another idea.

“She basically said, ‘Let’s write a sequel to it,’ ” Christopher recalls. “At the time, she was revisiting old properties. She had left the Catholic Church. She was returning to gothic, supernatural fiction, full bloom. She said, ‘This is a book that I left on a cliffhanger. It’s been hanging out there since 1990. It’s not really a story that’s ended. Let’s pick it up again.’ ”

So they did, hashing ideas out over tea and coffee. The result was Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra, published by Anchor in 2017. The novel was a departure for Christopher, who hadn’t tackled historical fiction before and wasn’t used to writing about villains who weren’t “clearly defined” evildoers.

“Her books don’t really often have villains,” Christopher says. “I softened that instinct in myself in response to working with her. And as a result, Cleopatra, who emerges in almost monstrous form in the first book because she’s brought back in such a brutal way, went from, in my mind, being this howling monster to being this more tragic Anne Rice–ian gothic figure. I think I walked away a better writer because of it.”

The collaboration was fun, Christopher says, but also intimidating. “You have to not fight with her like she’s your mother when you’re working together,” he says. “It has to become a work relationship. And so my tendency to throw a tantrum and storm out of the room like a 9-year-old because she doesn’t agree with me on how a chapter should go—I had to stow that.”

Christopher and Anne’s second collaboration came out at the beginning of the month, but it’s just the first of many books he has scheduled for release this year—there will also be a thriller, Decimate, and two romances, Sapphire Sunset and Sapphire Spring.

He’s also at work on a much more personal project: organizing a memorial for his mother. On Twitter, he promised Anne’s fans that they’ll have a chance to participate, writing that “All the covens of the world shall have ample time to assemble.” Now he has to reflect on what kind of tribute his mother would have wanted.

“I think she would want to be remembered as somebody who tried to fight back against mediocrity, someone who didn’t accept limitations,” he says. “I think she would want to be remembered as someone who refused to hear no when her dreams were on the line.”

In the meantime, tributes continue to pour in on social media from fans of Anne who are still trying to come to terms with her loss and still reflecting on the remarkable career of the author who understood them when nobody else did.

“To see the outpouring of that now, I sort of wish she could see it as well,” Christopher says. “I don’t know. Maybe she can.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.