Anne Rice, the bestselling author of Interview With the Vampire, has died at the age of 80. The gothic novelist’s son, Christopher Rice, said in a statement on Sunday morning that Rice had “passed away due to complications resulting from a stroke”, adding: “The immensity of our family’s grief cannot be overstated.” Rice wrote more than 30 books but was best known for her debut novel, Interview With the Vampire, which introduced the world to the saga of the vampire Lestat and moved from 18th-century Louisiana through the next 200 years. Published in 1976, it was made into a film in 1994 starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Kirsten Dunst. Audrey Niffenegger described it as Rice’s “masterpiece”. Rice wrote a further 12 novels in the Vampire Chronicles series, and was dismissive of the sparkly, vegetarian version of vampires made popular in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, saying she felt “sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun” and that Lestat “would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town”. The horror legend Ramsey Campbell said Rice wrote “in the great tradition of the gothic, both thematically and in her prose”. “I would argue it’s a specifically female lineage that stretches from the classical gothics but in particular from Mary Shelley, in its humanisation of the monster and the way it accords him a thoroughly literate voice,” Campbell said. The bestselling horror author Sarah Pinborough, whose Behind Her Eyes was recently adapted for Netflix, praised how Rice had transformed the genre. “I have had a fascination with vampires since early childhood and when I found Rice’s work I absolutely loved how she took that genre and created such a vivid world and characters within it and, more importantly, made them feel so contemporary and relevant,” she said. Rice was also known for her erotic fiction Sleeping Beauty series, and for novels about the life of Christ and about angels, written after she returned to her childhood faith of Catholicism in 1998 after decades of atheism. Rice said at the time that she “consecrated her writing entirely to Christ, vowing to write for Him or about Him”. But she later “quit” Christianity, writing on her Facebook page: “In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.” Rice’s husband, the poet Stan Rice, died in 2002. As well as Christopher, the couple had a daughter, Michele, who died of leukaemia in 1972 at the age of six. Rice started writing in the years after Michele’s death, telling the Guardian in 2010: “It was really a desperate attempt to be somebody. I looked around after my daughter’s death and realised I was nobody and nothing. I wasn’t even a mother any more. I had nothing.” Interview With the Vampire was published in 1976, and Christopher, who is also a writer, was born two years later. He said his mother “taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions”. He said: “In her final hours, I sat beside her hospital bed in awe of her accomplishments and her courage, awash in memories of a life that took us from the fog-laced hills of the San Francisco Bay area to the magical streets of New Orleans to the twinkling vistas of southern California. “As she kissed Anne goodbye, her younger sister Karen said: ‘What a ride you took us on, kid.’ I think we can all agree. Let us take comfort in the shared hope that Anne is now experiencing first-hand the glorious answers to many great spiritual and cosmic questions, the quest for which defined her life and career.” He said a public celebration of Rice’s life would be held next year in New Orleans, where the author was born and raised.