Interview with Christopher Rice

Christopher Rice may be the son of famed author Anne Rice and the late poet Stan Rice, but this novelist holds his own in the literary world with action-packed tales of love and friendship.

His credits include A Density of Souls (2000), The Snow Garden (2004), and Light Before Day (2006).

As a Rice family fan, I was elated to speak with Christopher about his parents, his new novel and the best thing he's ever written.

After you completed your first book, A Density of Souls, you showed it to your dad who in turn chopped it to pieces. How did you take the criticism?

Actually, my father had an enormously positive response to the first draft of A Density of Souls. He was the first person to read it and if he hadn't flipped over it, I'm not sure it ever would have seen the light of day. However, he did suggest that I remove some of the more sensational parts of the book, specifically the hurricane-fueled ending, which he felt was too over the top. I didn't take his advice and I'm proud of how the book stands up today.

What's the best thing you've ever written?

I'm usually most proud of whatever I've written most recently, and right now, that's a short story called "Over Thirty" which was just published in a wonderful anthology called Los Angeles Noir. Short stories are incredibly challenging. There's so much less room to hide your screw ups in.

If you could change anything about your childhood, what would it be?

I would have spent less time trying to change to suit others.

...and your adult life?

I would like to spend less time trying to change to suit others. And I'm always trying to cultivate greater gratitude for the abundant gifts I've been given.

If you could design your own gay pride float, what would it look like?

It would not be a float because it would not be in a parade. It would be at a conference and it would be a round table where Andrew Sullivan, Michelangelo Signorile, Camille Paglia, the head of HRC and the Board of Directors for GLAAD would all sit and have a civil conversation about where we are headed as a community. No one would call anyone self-loathing or an America-hating lefty simply because they didn't agree on a certain issue. No one would throw anything.

Tell us about your new book, Blind Fall.

It's the first novel I've written entirely from the point of view of a straight character. A straight Marine, no less. After returning home from Iraq, he seeks out the friend who saved his life in combat and discovers the man has been murdered in his home. He sees another man running from the scene and pursues him into the woods, convinced this guy is the killer. It turns out this man is actually the slain Marine's secret boyfriend and that he was probably next on the killer's hit list. Even though our main character is homophobic, he feels a sense of obligation to this boyfriend he's never met and decides that his values demand that he defend the guy against the dark forces that are clearly gunning for him.

How does your voice differ from that of your mom's novels and your dad's poetry?

That's an almost impossible question for me to answer since I'm so close to my work, and almost as close to their work as well. With Light Before Day I made a very conscious decision to enter a noir- space that felt very far away from the Gothic tone of most of my mother's novels. But I've always felt my prose style is more pared-down, more minimal, in a sense, then the voice my mother used to tell The Vampires Chronicles and the Lives of the Mayfair Witches. My father told me shortly before he died that he felt I didn't trust the first-person voice and was therefore suspicious of poetry in general, including his, which I often poked fun at when I was much younger. Writing Light Before Day in the first person was kind of a tribute to him in a way. He died shortly before I started writing it.