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vampires who could not endure the light of the sun and were doomed to fall in love with the beauty and sanctity of the human lives they destroyed. I wrote about witches - psychic humans with the capacity to attract supernatural forces that seem to obey no laws of right and wrong. I wrote about the Jews of ancient Babylon, struggling to maintain their auton-omy as a people "in a strange land." Very few of my characters were females.

When I did write about a feminine protagonist, I sensed a different response to the plot and to the character on the part of critics. Love scenes involving males were treated with dignity. A book involving a man and woman was dismissed as "a cheap romance." I took careful note of this. I came to avoid using women except in ways that wouldn't invite this dismissal. Still it happened. I don't say this lightly. Critics had it "in" for the female characters I created in a way that they never had it "in" for the males.

This is still the case.

Readers reflected this somewhat as well. They might adore a melancholy hero like the vampire Louis, or fall in love with the passionate and irrepressible vampire Lestat. But they were offended by the vampire Pandora, and put off by the young Mona Mayfair, who was in her own way no less interesting than the male characters in the book. The heroine of my novel Belinda was actually criticized for not being a typical teenager! And this from readers who had accepted a fourteen-year-old male Creole genius or tragic young vampires cursing Heaven with raised fists. Lestat's boasts were received as charming. Mona was viewed as impertinent.

Belinda was ignored because she was not a stereotype.

In sum, if I created a woman the way I wanted that woman to be, for many people this didn't work. My female characters were measured in terms of gender. With male characters I could achieve just about anything I wanted to achieve. Male characters didn't really have any gender.

Female characters were cursed and confined by it in the minds of those who read the books.

I can't say I reacted literally to this experience. I was aware of it; it influenced me subconsciously or consciously in fragmented form. I did not set out to do anything about it. But it had its inevitable effect.

But by and large, I wrote what I felt impelled to write. I was the "he" of my fiction. Or the "she" of it in those few times when a woman entered the scene.

Perhaps the most significant book I wrote before my conversion to Christianity was the novel Violin. There are many complex reasons why this book was important to me, why it involved pain and exposure that some of the other books did not. But I am convinced to this day that the reason my readers largely overlooked it was the fact that it involves a woman's creative experience and not that of a man. If a gorgeous gay man had taken the place in the book of Triana Becker, the public response might have had considerably more depth. Whatever the case, the book is not only about grief and faith, and the redemptive potential of art - this it has in common with all my books - but it is also about my childhood, about the chapel in New Orleans where I first experienced faith in God. It's about the losses I suffered as a child, and about my core beliefs regarding art and blood metaphoric blood and literal blood. It is perhaps the cleanest allegory of my own creative life. However, allegories of my own creative life fill my other books, including most especially The Vampire Armand and the novel Blood and Gold.

Why I managed to become such a financial success at all is a bit of a mystery. These books were each eccentric, one differing violently from the one before it, and the entire oeuvre made almost no concessions to the marketplace at all. True there is plot, character, spectacle, and tragedy in these books, but the books are not easy to read, and they are too eccentric to be easily described. The only people who provide easy descriptions of them are people who have never read them.

Because these books involve the supernatural, they are apparently extremely easy to condemn or dismiss.

But success I enjoyed, no matter what turn in the road I took.

Let me suggest one reason why the books found a