The Urge to Write Is in His Blood

Christopher Rice is at home in West Hollywood, winding down as he nears the finish of a 14-city book tour, an experience he has approached with “healthy terror,” in no small part because of the “tiresome” questions about his mother, vampire maven Anne Rice, and nepotism in the publishing world and all that.

The questions are inevitable. When barely of drinking age, he landed a two-book contract with Talk Miramax Books, a deal that he will only say was for $100,000 to $250,000.

But to those who insinuate that the 24-year-old is riding the literary coattails of his mother, creator of “Interview With the Vampire,” Rice has one question: “Can I see your novel?” OK, he concedes that “the speed with which I got an agent was amazing.” (He shares Mom’s agent, Lynn Nesbit.) But, “if there was nothing to back it up, I would have vanished in five minutes.”

He hasn’t vanished. His dark 2000 coming-of-age novel, “A Density of Souls,” sold about 90,000 hardcover copies and is out in paperback. He has followed up with “The Snow Garden,” a murder thriller set on a fictional eastern college campus.

It is no coincidence both books center on gay characters. Rice, who came out when he was 18, drew heavily on his nightmarish years as a closeted gay at a prestigious private high school in New Orleans for “A Density of Souls.” He says, “It was just like my high school experience, except for all the murders.”

His writing, published and not, always has depicted violence against gays. “Before Matthew Shepard was killed,” he says, “I thought maybe I was going a bit over the top with it.” When the University of Wyoming freshman was brutally murdered in 1998, Rice knew it wasn’t just his imagination. Although Rice’s debut novel resonated with young gay men--”as if it was their new bible,” he says--he does not target a gay readership nor label himself a gay author. He reserves that “title of distinction” for men like Edmund White, now in his 60s, “who were out there when there was almost a political imperative to tell gay stories. That void does not exist anymore. I don’t think necessarily there is a need.”

Today, Rice says, the issues “are a little muddier, not necessarily all positive. There is a generation of young gay men who are not the most noble creatures on the planet. They’re a little self-obsessed. They have a terrific sense of entitlement.” Ironic, he observes, in that “they haven’t lived under this curtain of repressive silence [that their elders have]. Yet a lot of them burst out of the closet with the attitude of me, me, more, more, the world owes me this and that.”

He acknowledges, “I did it. I just had a deep, built-up sense of frustration” rooted in his teen years as a creative, sensitive kid in a school where jocks reigned. When he did come out, after graduation, “It was sort of like going from 0 to 100, a gay bar every weekend.” And in New Orleans, where he then lived with his mother and father, poet-artist Stan Rice, “If you’re as tall as the bar, you get in.”

One thing Rice has learned in the last two years is that being a Rice does not make him immune to the slings and arrows of book critics. “A Density of Souls,” a story of murder, madness, rape and suicide evolving around four friends growing up in New Orleans--the central character being tall, blond and blue-eyed, much like Rice--received decidedly mixed reviews.

The New York Times found it “scarily sincere and ultimately preposterous.” Another critic suggested it could have been written by those proverbial monkeys with a typewriter. Ouch. But the Washington Post lauded it for its “unexpected twists,” clever plot and lingering images.

His new novel, set at fictional Atherton University, is a murder mystery centered on an affair between a gay student and his married art history professor. The mix includes a militant black lesbian, a muckraking gay reporter for the campus newspaper and, as the protagonist’s best friend, a freshman with a dark secret to explain her sexual hang-ups.

Again, reaction has been across the board. Publisher’s Weekly suggested that “readers may not want to relive their freshman year for 400 pages in order to learn whodunit.” The Library Journal panned it as “a histrionic hodgepodge,” suggesting that Rice readers “stick with Mom.” But Booklist praised it as “an enthralling narrative” and Amazon.com buyers found it “stimulating” and “electrifying in its intensity.” The novel quickly peaked at No. 12 on the New York Times bestsellers list.

Rice, a mature and composed young man, is quick to acknowledge that his plots may be overwrought and there are passages in his first novel that five years from now may make him wince. Still, he says, “I’m never going to bill myself as a quiet, contemplative writer. This may sound kind of young of me, but when I write a book I have to surrender to it.”

For the last year, home to Rice has been a spacious upper duplex in a flamingo pink Spanish-style compound just off Sunset Boulevard. There, in a sunny living room with one wall anchored by a gigantic TV, he pushes aside an ashtray full of Marlboro butts, settles back and talks about becoming a writer.

He was 6, a child fascinated with cataclysmic events depicted in movies such as “The Towering Inferno,” and had just written a novella. “It was preposterous, as the New York Times would say. It was about the Golden Gate Bridge catching fire and burning for two days. Finally, my mother said, very gently, ‘It can’t really burn. It’s iron and steel.’ I was crushed.”

After high school, he was set on being an actor and enrolled at Brown University, where he had a rude awakening. “I auditioned for my first play [one of his favorites, Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia”] and didn’t even get called back.” Nor was he cast in a play created by “two [students] who’d written every word while they were on acid.”

Rejected, he turned next to filmmaking at Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. But, finding the general education curriculum limited, he dropped out after one semester. “I just left. I didn’t know what I was going to do.” So he moved to Los Angeles at 20 and “worked on screenplays that I never showed to anyone.” One day he realized, “I was too young to be living out here. I had vague notions of doing everything, acting, writing.... “

Fate played a hand; he was called home when his mother went into a nearly fatal diabetic coma. The return to New Orleans jarred him--”It sort of squeezed all these memories out”--and there he wrote the first draft of “A Destiny of Souls.”

His themes are dark. An inherited literary gene, perhaps? “Yeah, absolutely. In my house, growing up, no subject was taboo. As a result, all three of us indulged our darker sides and our worst nightmares and all three of us have obsessive personalities.” Great for art, he mentions, but his “panic and self-doubt and fear” make getting through each day tough.

When Rice was 5, a family friend let slip that he’d had a sister, Michele, who had died of leukemia at the same age. His parents had never told him, thinking it was something a 5-year-old couldn’t absorb. “I remember a little sting,” he says. “But the loss they’d suffered was greater than anything I could experience. To me, she was my parents’ daughter.”

The first Anne Rice book he read was “Belinda,” an erotic novel she wrote under the pseudonym Anne Rampling because her Roman Catholic father was still alive. It is the story of an older artist obsessed with his young model.

He began reading his mother’s vampire books only after he left home the first time and was “incredibly homesick. It was a wonderful way to get her voice back.” Until then, “I was like the kid who’s the son of the Kellogg’s people and doesn’t want to eat Cornflakes. I knew the stories [already] because they were discussed at dinner.”

He scoffs at depictions of his mother as “a gothic queen devouring bats alive. She’s really upstairs in a sundress eating crackers and cheese and watching TV. She carries a glow with her, not a cloud of doom.”

His mother is a Catholic who recently returned to the church she’d left in her 20s. She returned, her son says, “with a lot of questions for the priests and has told them upfront she doesn’t agree with the church’s position on homosexuality.” He is himself an agnostic who’ll “be willing to believe if a ray of light falls out of the sky.”

Soon, he plans to start work on a sequel to “The Snow Garden.” He thinks there always will be gay characters in his novels, but “I see homosexuality receding into the background.”

A night owl, he gets up late and writes from about 2 to 6 p.m. Much of that time he is sitting in his living room, notebook on his lap, with film soundtracks playing in the background (favorite composers include Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) as he scribbles at a “feverish pace.”

Out and about in Los Angeles, he observes people who may become composites in his novels. “I’ve met some definite characters in West Hollywood. L.A. is very, very ripe” for mining. But he is not yet ready to write a novel set in the city--”Before I can write about L.A. with any kind of authority, I need another year here.”

Favorite haunts include Book Soup and, for night life, the Abbey, a hot gay bar. Though young and single, Rice says, “I don’t really lead a party life like I used to. But my social group kind of centers [at the Abbey]. It’s their hub.”

Often, at 9 or 10 at night, he does “this very odd thing that my friends all think is pretty bizarre.” He drives over Beverly Glen to the San Fernando Valley, drives down Ventura Boulevard and then back up over Laurel Canyon. “There’s something about snaking through those hills alone at night, listening to my car radio, that is kind of liberating and frees up my mind.”

As he drives, enjoying “the sense of space and freedom that is very much what drew me here,” he is also thinking about the book he is writing. “It’s usually what I do when the plot is taking too much shape and too many ideas are fighting for control and I have to kind of step back and let go.”

He finds L.A. “wonderfully different” from New Orleans and the “spoiled brat existence” living under his parents’ roof. While he remains close to his family, he says, “Here, I feel like an adult, not the odd man out with these fantasies of being a screenwriter. I fell into a step I’d been wanting to walk.”