Christopher Rice

Christopher Travis Rice (born March 11, 1978) is an American author. Rice made his fiction debut in 2000 with the bestselling A Density of Souls, going on to write many more novels, including The Snow Garden, The Heavens Rise, The Vines, as well as the Burning Girl series. His work spans multiple genres, including suspense, crime, supernatural thriller, and erotic romance. With his mother Anne Rice, he is the co-author of the historical-horror novels Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra and its sequel, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris. Biography Christopher Rice comes from a family of authors. His parents were renowned horror novelist Anne Rice and poet Stan Rice; his aunt, Alice Borchardt, was a noted writer of fantasy and historical fiction. Rice had an older sister named Michele, who he never met as she died of leukemia in 1972 when she was five years old. Rice was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and spent the first ten years of his childhood in the Castro District. In an interview with The Advocate after the publication of his first novel, A Density of Souls, Rice describes the culture shock that resulted from his family's move to New Orleans when he was ten years old. "...being dropped in New Orleans, it was completely different. I went from a school in San Francisco where we called our lesbian teachers by their first names to this uptown, private elementary school where we all had to go to chapel in the morning." Rice has lived in New Orleans and is a 1996 graduate of the Isidore Newman School, which he attended during the same time period as future NFL stars Peyton Manning and Eli Manning. He has stated that while he was never physically threatened during high school, his knowledge of his own sexuality and his failure to play athletics made him feel like an outcast. Of this time in his life, Rice said, "I had money, had a nice car, was white. I could have fit in, but I knew I didn't belong. I knew I didn't share their dreams and ambitions and their values". These experiences ultimately inspired his first novel, A Density of Souls. Rice began visiting gay bars and clubs during his senior year of high school, but he did not come out to his parents until he met his first boyfriend. His father had no trouble accepting Rice's sexuality, but his mother believed he was bisexual based on the number of intimate relationships he had enjoyed with the opposite sex during high school.