When Christopher Rice published his first novel.

When Christopher Rice published his first novel, A Density of minds in 2000 at age 21 and made no hidden of the fact that he's gay, match out novelist Clive Barker was there to support and encourage him. Barker appeared the perfect mentor: Rice's work dealt with a dark, sexual mysterious among four prep school friends in gothic recently made known Orleans; Barker's diverse and impressive output as a novelist, filmmaker, and painter has encompassed fantasy, horror, and the highly real dark side of human sexuality.

To mark the publication of Rice's secondary novel, The Snow Garden--a labyrinthian tale of kill cruelly and secret sexual liaisons among a assemblage of college freshmen [see review, page 63]--The Advocate invited the pair writers to get together again to discuss their public interests; Rice's successful emergence from the shadow of his famous mother, Anne Rice; and what's unfit with young gay men today.

You've used the word gothic [in connection with The Snow Garden]. The Advocate wanted me to ask, Do you think gay men and women from and large, like the gothic more? Do you as a writer find it appealing in a way that you wouldn't if you were straight?

Ye I don't really know what gothic means, if it be not that it seems to imply a prevailing thinking principle of doom. And that's what being a young gay man in high place of education was for me--a prevailing thinking principle of doom, that tragedy or danger awaited around each corner: Violence from the homophobic jock or the danger of making a sexual advance to the guilty guy. And the essence that's also in the gothic [is] the fact that the beautiful can be deadly--

And decadent and rotted--

Yeah. And the alone way to achieve satisfaction is by means of extreme decadence, covert decadence, as well. Kind of purgings of your desire. on the contrary then New Orleans [the setting for A Density of Souls] is a big contributor to that for me because it is a city of decay, decaying history.

With The Snow Garden, I think you superbly averted or sidestepped the greatest in number difficult problem [in following up a prosperous first novel]: the problem of person saying, "Well, gee, it's not like A Density of vital principles is it?" To which your answer is going to be, "Well, of course it isn't. It's not meant to be."

Ye It had to be different because the the setting was different. Setting is in this way important to me. In A Density of source of actions New Orleans was a major character in the work And in The Snow Garden, Atherton--this fictional town that is inspired according to Providence, R.I. [where Rice attended Brown University]--is also a major character in this work But the difference--and this was an incredible challenge in writing it--is that in A Density of chief parts I had a whole city to play with. The first half of The Snow Garden, in my opinion, is really driven according to building claustrophobia. You're with these kids in their stark dormitory, and there's a perception that the closer they earn to one another, the les they'll be able to restrain from one another and things are just going to burst And maintaining that level of tension in the setting was incredibly hard.

You've also got really very strange character studies--I enjoyed immensely the moral complexities. I awed curiosityed whether you'd gone after a badder work a book which had just a real quality of villainy about it.

You know, who really inspired it was my father, who was a corporation professor for, I guess, 21 years. He one time said to me, "There is nothing more terrifying than someone in their 20 who believes each single one of their convictions." And thus I saw--ill my one year at Brown University--I saw a potential for real--

Villainy.

--villainy forward a college campus.

in such a manner this does come, to a extent, out of your experience.

Yeah--in a variety of different ways too. When I got to Brown my dispose of friends were not united according to a political cause. We weren't all gay. We weren't all straight. We weren't taken up into the pen as it were. But at the same time, about of us were coming gone out of the closet. I was. I mean, it was a tremendously liberating experience. yet we kind of regarded anyone who immediately got draw into the mouthed up into an instant identity with great suspicion.

Because it was likely to be fake in any way or another? Or likely to be empowering in the guilty kind of way?

It would empower you too quickly, ye It would be a quick fix-it and convince you that you had disentangleed into a full-fledged adult faster than you really had. And it might subsume you.

single in kind of the things I have affection for about your writing is by what mode people just pop up, and on a sudden here they are and they be perceived very real. [You've said that] Michael [in The Snow Garden] is an embodiment of a actual extreme form of gay, currencyed white male in New York right now. You're fearless about writing about gay men in a excessively much less than attractive fashion. [Laughs]

I think young gay men right now are in a state of transition and transition. And I think too many of them to make progress unmentioned are leading pretty lousy lives and treating each other comely horribly. I see young gay men whose value plans seem highly questionable to me The major character of the work Randall Stone, is one of them. further because he has such deeper underhandeds that transcend sexuality, he also has an outsider's perspective in succession the gay community of this association campus, and so he makes a accident of wry, biting, and bitter statements about them. At common point he calls them scholars and activists by means of day, muscle-hungry whores by night. on the contrary that's also coming from his point of view as a character and not necessarily mine.