Best selling suspense novelist Christopher Rice talks chillers & thrillers

Acclaimed author Christopher Rice quickly rose up as master of suspense in the world of literature. At 22, Christopher wrote his first thriller, the New York Times best seller, A Density of Souls.

By the time Christopher turned 30, he published three more New York Times best sellers.

You could say success runs in the Rice family. Christopher is the son of poet Stan Rice and famous novelist Anne Rice, author of international hit books like Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned.

Family legacy aside, Christopher is an accomplished author in his own right and his work isn’t near finished.

Christopher is currently working on The Heavens Rise, his latest novel that promises to be nothing like he’s written before.

Over the phone from his home in California, the writer talks chillers and thrillers.

You say you read as much as you write. What is the creepiest thing you have ever read?
It was a scene in Stephen King’s novel Desperation. A band of people trying to flee a haunted desert town in Arizona come across a seemingly empty house only to discover an entire family seated at a dinner table, dead in their chairs. Too late, they notice the bite marks covering their arms and faces and then rattlesnake after rattlesnake comes slithering out of every crevice. Terrifying! Stephen King makes you feel every single second of it.

Your mother is the author of the international hit books Interview with the Vampire and The Witching Hour. What was it like growing up with a mom who wrote about vampires and witches?
My mother never scared me with stories of vampires and witches. As a young child, I remember thinking that the real world, the threat of nuclear war and serial killers were frightening enough. She shared that view. We are both highly imaginative people and we only need to hear a few details of some horrible news story or frightening true life tale to imagine what it was like for someone to go through it.

What basics does a writer need to know when trying to deliver a suspenseful thriller?
Good suspense is not the result of external factors. It comes from the collision of something intrinsic to your character and the external factors pressing down on them. It’s not enough to put a bomb under the dinner table. One of the people seated at the table has to know the bomb is there but they refuse to diffuse it for a very specific reason.

Your New York Times Bestselling thrillers A Density of Souls and The Snow Garden star wicked, monstrous people. How did you tap into such a sinister mind frame and create these evil characters?
I think part of my fascination with “real monsters” comes out of my sense of having been an outsider for most of my life. But another part of it is my belief that evil does not consider itself evil, so how do you define it? In creating these real monsters, I think all writers are looking for new terms they can use to define evil.

What is your idea of evil?
Faceless killers don’t frighten me as much as someone with the ability to seduce me into making myself vulnerable to them. The serial killer who starts by lending a helping hand scares me. That’s evil. Ted Bundy would be close to my idea of the Boogeyman.

Have you had any real life eerie encounters?
I used a Ouija board once in a former orphanage that my mother owned in New Orleans. I left the room while two of my friends handled the board. I picked a book of a shelf from a library on another floor and returned to the room with the book hidden under my shirt. The Ouija board spelled out the title of the book that I was concealing to the letter. I’ve never gone near one again.

You’ve lived in New Orleans and now California. Which place has a larger fright factor?
New Orleans has the obvious creep factor but there are far scarier things about California. Most of California is rural and desolate, and the big cities are incredibly easy to get lost in. People come to California with very big dreams and when those dreams aren’t satisfied, their ambition can warp into a very scary thing.

Christopher Rice currently lives in Los Angeles and is working on his latest novel The Heavens Rise.

Posted by Marc Andrew on Oct 31 2011. Filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.