BOOKS

Life happens
Gay novelist Christopher Rice has settled down and sobered up, and with his new book, ‘Light Before Day,’ his true talent shines.

By JOHNNY HOOKS
Friday, March 18, 2005

At the beginning of Christopher Rice’s new novel, “Light Before Day,” a crystal meth lab tucked inside a filthy doublewide trailer in Northern California explodes in a ball of fire. A teacher searching for her student is killed.

The action jumps to the West Hollywood area of Los Angeles, where we are introduced to Adam Murphy, a boozy writer for Glitz magazine who gets fired over a story about a marine helicopter pilot who flew his aircraft into the Pacific.

Murphy is in love with Corey, who disappears and is thought to be a victim of the West Hollywood Slasher. After landing a job with mystery writer James Wilton, Murphy and Wilton search for answers. The search leads them to drug dealers, a meth assassin, pedophiles and hustlers, all ending in a hail of bullets.

“Light Before Day” is a novel that is lightning fast and in your face with its honest take on the seedy side of gay culture in Los Angeles. As with the first two Rice novels, the author weaves seemingly unrelated people and places with surreal events to create a terrifically rich tapestry.

Rice drops few clues along the way until a gasp-inducing moment when all aspects of the story become clear. In this latest novel, Rice leaves behind the gothic tones of his two previous books, “A Density of Souls” and “The Snow Garden” and commits himself to an out-and-out thriller.

The book evolved out of a short story he wrote for Genre magazine when he was serving as its fiction editor. It was called “November Brings Fog” —different from “Light Before Day,” but also about a young gay man who was obsessed with this phantom serial killer named the West Hollywood Slasher.

Rice readily admits that Wilton is based on his own father, the late poet Stan Rice. “My relationship with my father was largely good,” he says. “He was a complicated man. We were very close, and it was an adult-adult relationship. He never treated me like a kid. The father-son relationship between Jimmy and Adam was just a natural by-product of writing the novel so soon after my dad died.”

Writing in first-person for the first time changes the narrative and the scope of his characters as well. The result is a deeper, better-rounded and ultimately more enjoyable book on every level. Fans of Rice’s first two books should find more to enjoy here. Newcomers and those who didn’t get the author’s work before this project should give “Light Before Day” a try to see that Rice’s own life lessons have changed him and his work for the better.

Rice himself says he is now completely sober. He says the book reflected his life in other ways, too: “I experienced a lot of things at once that forced me to grow up. My father became gravelly ill and eventually died. I met someone, who for all intensive purposes I married. Life was happening.”

Originally contracted to write a sequel to his bestseller, “The Snow Garden,” he now says he’s glad he baled. “I’m glad I’m not locked into characters I created four years ago,” he says. “My life is so different now.”

Despite his subject matter, Rice insists that he is not a “gay writer.” “I don’t think I have been labeled a gay writer,” he says. “I’ve never seen a bookstore stock my titles in the gay section. I’ve never seen the limitations that come with that label. I think the reason writers don’t like that label is that it implies a lower standard for their work.” Besides, he says, gay-themed books have become more mainstream recently.

So what does his mother, the super-fabulous and utterly gay-obsessed novelist Anne Rice, think of “Light Before Day”?

“My mom thought it was wonderful,” he says. “She had a stronger reaction to this one than the other two. She thought it was about a completely independent and sovereign gay community, a gay community where they were not dependent upon or blaming the straight community for their own problems.”

Anne Rice was very good friends with John Preston, the pioneer S&M writer who died of AIDS in the ‘90s. Christopher Rice says she used to tell him, “You need to write about what you’re doing for each other in this epidemic. She felt I touched on that in this novel, regarding the relationship between Adam and Nate Bain, how they watch out for one another,” Rice says. “She said while Jimmy may be important, he’s not the savior in the end.”

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