NEW YORK -- Anne Rice, the novelist whose lush, best-selling gothic tales, including “Interview With the Vampire,” reinvented the blood-drinking immortals as tragic antiheroes, has died. She was 80.Rice died late Saturday due to complications from a stroke, her son Christopher Rice announced on her Facebook page and his Twitter page.“As a writer, she taught me to defy genre boundaries and surrender to my obsessive passions,” Christopher Rice, also an author, wrote.