"I feel kind of reborn lately," says Rice from her room in Toronto's Four Seasons Hotel.
Delighted she has a cordless phone ("so I can walk around while we talk"), the 70-year-old New Orleans native crackles with energy. She's charged up, she says, sounding a little like a prizefighter.
Rice says she has felt reborn and refreshed and has been roiling with new ideas and a renewed creative spark since her very public renunciation of the Roman Catholic Church in 2010, which followed an intense 12-year engagement with the church.
An avowed atheist all her life, Rice had what she described at the time as a "conversion from a pessimistic atheist . . . to an optimistic believer" in 1998. She says she eventually left the church for "moral reasons" after years of disillusionment with its policies and political position.
"In the name of Christ, I refuse to be antigay. I refuse to be antifeminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism," Rice wrote on her Facebook page in July 2010.
Rice says she did her best writing during this period and counts her two books on the life of Christ, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana as her most accomplished books. (A third is in progress.)
Rice also insists she retains a strong faith in God and the Christian message. She says she feels lighter now.
"I want to be free to do almost anything I want to do" as an artist, she says - including a walk on the wild werewolf side.
If The Wolf Gift marks a creative return to genre for Rice, it is also a notable departure. It is, as the title suggests, about werewolves, creatures that never have been associated with the novelist, who reinvented the vampire genre with her 10-volume "The Vampire Chronicles" series.
