First in Series: Anne Rice’s Most Iconic Books

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Anne Rice Books: First in Series You Need to Sink Your Teeth Into

Anne Rice didn’t just write gothic horror. She rewired it. From decadent vampires to cursed witches, she gave us sagas that blurred the line between terror and beauty, darkness and desire. Her books are more than stories; they’re immersive worlds where the supernatural feels both seductive and terrifying. Whether you’re new to her work or circling back for a reread, the question always comes up: where do you start?

That’s what this list is for. We’re focusing on the first in series. The novels that launched her most iconic sagas and cracked open the door to entire worlds of mystery, immortality, and moral chaos.

Gothic Roots With a Modern Bite

Anne Rice didn’t just write about vampires and witches; she reinvented them. Her stories are lush, sensual, and tangled up in history, weaving gothic atmosphere with very modern questions about power, morality, and desire. She gave us creatures who were more than monsters. They were philosophers, lovers, and reluctant immortals who made readers rethink what horror could feel like. That fusion of decadence and dread is why her series still feel so alive decades later.

Where to Begin With Anne Rice’s Worlds

With more than 30 novels spanning vampires, witches, mummies, angels, and werewolves, Anne Rice built interconnected worlds that can be intimidating to new readers. The best entry point? Start at the beginning. Each of her major sagas kicks off with a novel that establishes the lore, the mood, and the unforgettable characters. Below, you’ll find the first books in her most iconic series. The perfect place to sink your teeth in.

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The Witching Hour

Anne Rice

Horror, Occult Horror, Supernatural Horror

Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him. As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, an intricate tale of evil unfolds. Moving through time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the Louis XIV’s France, and from the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, The Witching Hour is a luminous, deeply enchanting novel.

Interview with the Vampire

Anne Rice

Horror

Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write.

The Mummy or Ramses the Damned

Anne Rice

Horror, Occult Horror

Ramses the Great lives! But having drunk the elixer of live, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied—for food, for wine, for women. Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes Dr. Ramsey, expert in Egyptology. He also becomes the close companion of voluptuous, adventurous Julie Stratford, heiress to a vast shipping fortune and the center of a group of jaded aristocrats with appetites of their own to appease. But the pleasures Ramses enjoys with Julie cannot soothe him. Searing memories of his last reawakening, at the behest of Cleopatra, his beloved Queen of Egypt, burn in his immortal soul. And though he is immortal, he is still all too human. His intense longings for his great love, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger. . . .

Pandora

Anne Rice

Horror, Thriller

In a bustling Parisian café, David meets Pandora, a Child of the Millennia and the first vampire created by the legendary Marius. At David’s urging, Pandora reluctantly begins to recount her extraordinary life—a tale spanning centuries and continents. Pandora takes us back to her girlhood in Imperial Rome, a world alive with the grandeur of Caesar Augustus and chronicled by Ovid and Petronius. There, she falls in love with the mortal Marius, a charismatic and lighthearted figure. Forced to flee Rome under threat of assassination, Pandora journeys to the exotic port of Antioch, where she is reunited with Marius, now immortal. Gifted with the Dark Gift, Pandora and Marius embark on a turbulent adventure through two centuries, battling their vampire natures and the challenges of an ever-changing world.

Angel Time

Anne Rice

It’s the present day. Toby O’Dare—aka Lucky the Fox—is a contract killer on assignment once again. He’s a soulless soul, a dead man walking. His nightmarish world of lone and lethal missions is disrupted when a mysterious stranger, a seraph, offers him a chance to save rather than destroy lives. O’Dare, who long ago dreamt of being a priest, seizes his chance. Now he is carried back through the ages to thirteenth-century England, to dark realms where children suddenly die or disappear, and accusations of ritual murder have been made against Jews. Here O’Dare begins his perilous quest for salvation, a journey of danger and flight, loyalty and betrayal, selflessness and love.

The Wolf Gift

Anne Rice

Horror, Occult Horror, Paranormal Fantasy

When Reuben Golding, a young reporter on assignment, arrives at a secluded mansion on a bluff high above the Pacific, it’s at the behest of the home’s enigmatic female owner. She quickly seduces him, but their idyllic night is shattered by violence when the man is inexplicably attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness. It will set in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation that will propel Reuben into a mysterious new world and raise profound questions.

The Legacy of Anne Rice’s Firsts

Anne Rice didn’t just launch series; she launched obsessions. Each first-in-series book is a gateway into sprawling worlds filled with haunted legacies, tortured immortals, and big, impossible questions about what it means to live forever, or not live at all. Whether you’re in the mood for vampires, witches, mummies, angels, or werewolves, the best way in is always at the beginning.