Thriller: Stories to Keep You Up All Night

Christopher Rice

Christopher Rice's first novel, the Gothic thriller A Density of Souls, was published when he was just twenty-two years old. Being the son of vampire novelist Anne Rice, his novel was met with a great deal of media attention and more than a fair amount of skepticism. But it was The Snow Garden, Rice's second New York Times bestseller, that cemented his reputation as a writer capable of bringing stories with fully realized gay characters to a wider commercial audience.

While his latest novel, Light Before Day, explores the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles's gay ghetto, Rice's consistent focus over the course of three books has been on the complex relationships that develop between straight and gay characters drawn together by a shared trauma. The Snow Garden focused on the murderous deceits that threaten a close friendship between a straight woman and a gay man. Light Before Day centered on the parental relationship that developed between a bestselling mystery novelist and his gay assistant. This same theme can be found here in Man Catch, where a young woman's sudden discovery of a loved one's closeted homosexuality brings a rain of violence down onto a tightly knit family unit.

Man Catch was a challenge for Rice. Unaccustomed to writing short fiction and often praised by his readers for detailed setting and atmosphere, he studied the efforts of Richard Matheson and David Morrell in an effort to tell the most fully realized story in the fewest words. At first, letting go of some of the texture and color Rice loves to include in his work was a frightening challenge. But ultimately, he says, it proved a deeply gratifying exercise.