Background and career
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 novel Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra and its sequel, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris. As of 2025, Rice lived in West Hollywood, California.
Christopher Rice was born on March 11, 1978. His parents were 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, Michele, who died from 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. Rice described the culture shock that resulted from his family's move to New Orleans when he was ten years old: "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 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 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 accepted Rice's sexuality, but his mother initially believed he was bisexual based on his past relationships. Rice went on to attend Brown University, an experience which inspired his second novel, The Snow Garden. During his freshman year, he intended to become an actor. He transferred to Tisch School of the Arts where he studied Dramatic Writing. He did not graduate from either school; he instead moved to Los Angeles to explore writing screenplays.
Some of Rice's works contain descriptions of contemporary American life for the gay male. When asked in 2002 about "being pegged a 'gay writer'", he replied:
That's not what I do. I might be more open to that label if I hadn't introduced ensemble casts of characters. Granted, A Density of Souls is as close to a gay book as you can get. It revolves around a character's homosexuality and others are described in terms of their reaction to the one character's sexuality. In that sense, it's at the core of the book. The Snow Garden is about identity. With this book, I'm trying to shrug off the term "gay" author. Rice is proud of the reaction of the gay community to his writing, explaining "it was incredibly rewarding when I got a huge positive response from the character Stephen in A Density of Souls. More than a thousand young gay men contacted me and said that I captured what it was like for them going through those years. That means everything to me."
In December 1998, Anne Rice had a medical crisis and nearly died when she fell into a diabetic coma. Her son Christopher wrote his first novel, A Density of Souls, upon returning home to New Orleans during her recuperation. Published the following year, Souls generated buzz in the gay and mainstream press, and became a New York Times Best Seller. His second novel, The Snow Garden received a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men's Mystery. For many years, Rice wrote a regular column for the LGBT-related biweekly news magazine The Advocate called "Coastal Disturbances," in which he discussed various topics.
Early in his career, Rice distinguished himself by saying that unlike his famous mother, he did not write horror novels, instead considering his books to be thrillers. However, as years went by, Rice became more comfortable experimenting in different genres, exploring his own version of the supernatural with works such as The Heavens Rise, published in 2013, and The Vines. Both of these novels were met with critical acclaim, and each was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel, but they lost to Dr. Sleep by Stephen King and Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem, in their respective years. On the publication of The Heavens Rise in 2013, Rice told The Advocate magazine that part of his motivation for writing the novel came from a desire to tell a New Orleans-set story with a more sympathetic ensemble of characters than the one featured in his debut, A Density of Souls. "I said my first novel put the city through such hell, both figuratively and literally, at least certain neighborhoods. But honestly, what happened to me is that I grew up. And I saw my perspective on the city and some of its communities in A Density of Souls to be youthful and unforgiving. And I had a desire to back and write a kinder, gentler New Orleans story, which, because I'm a Rice, turned into a horror novel."
