A Density of Souls - Softcover

There's murder, suicide, and madness at the heart of this rather clumsy coming-of-age story, which focuses on the youthful friendship of Stephen Conlin, Meredith Ducote, Greg Darby, and Brandon Charbonnet. This friendship is destroyed by a sexual incident that takes place just before the foursome enters Cannon, an exclusive prep school. There, Stephen is ostracized by his former friends, now the most popular kids on campus, who'd just as soon forget their own complicity in the event. Envy, passion, and rage drive the narrative, but the emotions are as juvenile as the characters, and the long passages depicting the rituals and cruelties of high school, from pep rallies to football games, slow down the pace without really illuminating character or motivation. The novel reads like a roman à clef. Rice might have been wiser to tell someone else's story rather than his own. --Jane Adams

Born in San Francisco and raised in New Orleans from the age of ten, Christopher Rice published four New York Times bestsellers, received a Lambda Literary Award, and was declared one of People Magazine’s Sexiest Men Alive, all by the age of thirty. His debut novel, A Density of Souls, was greeted with a landslide of media attention, much of it an offshoot of his mother’s fame as a legendary vampire chronicler. His supernatural thriller The Heavens Rise was a Bram Stoker Award nominee. The InsightOut Book Club selected his book Blind Fall as a best novel of 2008. In addition, his noir thriller Light Before Day was hailed as a “book of the year” by Lee Child. He has served as a contributing columnist to The Advocate and has been published in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Salon.com. His short fiction has been featured in the anthologies Thriller and Los Angeles Noir.