By now you should be used to the cover images I include with my reviews. This month, I break with tradition just a bit; the image at right is a combination of the cover illustration with the author’s image in the jacket: Christopher Rice was born in 1978.
Luckily, this is not one of those hideous, Nifty Erotic Stories Archive-quality twink. Although this one is enamored with the word “cock,” he can and does use capital letters and punctuation. Luckily, he does not cash in on the good name of his parents. What do you mean that you can read his last name on the cover with your glasses off? Be fair, the publisher was all out of small font. And how can you draw any comparison between the scene in the “Heaven’s Answer” chapter, where one character is nailed—through his hand—to a board, and any scene from Interview with the Vampire? That’s just mean. Seriously, though, when I read a book like this and learn of its success, I lament that Lawrence Kinsman, who writes better books, will never have the kind access to the gay mainstream press afforded to the young Rice. That’s too bad.
A Density of Souls is Rice’s first novel, written when he was 22 and just out of high school. The book opens with four friends enroute to a cemetery in New Orleans to play tag. Brandon, Greg, Stephen, and Meredith are the mains. The book is written entirely in third-person omniscient, but occasionally the details are given solely from one person’s point of view. In this scene, we see what Meredith sees, and what she sees is a bit of a turning point, for she will soon make a decision to hurt one of them to gain immediate entry into Cannon High School’s in-crowd. The plan works, but the crowd isn’t very good for her. She’s soon bulimic and a heavy drinker. Somehow the combination does not kill her and apparently she overcomes the bulimia, but we never see this conversion or recovery.
The characters are sad, mostly, with Greg probably the saddest. His exit from the story is early, leaving a lot of time for the story to evolve from this event. Contemplation of the alternate timeline (where he remains in the story) is rare and gloomy, but I’m not sure it would have been so, considering Brandon’s fuse length. Brandon is just plain evil, capable of shredding bicycles with his bare hands and evading law enforcement no matter how many bodies stack up. Finally, Stephen is Christopher Rice himself, and I think that Monica is an inside glimpse at old Anne.
There are more problems in this book than I can count. When I first sat down at the reading group meeting, I asked whether anyone could actually explain what happened in this book. The table was silent. I’ve read the book a second time since then, and I still cannot explain all the behaviors going on.
It doesn’t help that Rice’s set descriptions are dreadful, and as the action gets more climactic, the descriptions get worse. At my reading group meeting, each of us shared what we envisioned during the final bell tower scene, and we all had substituted a scene from a movie or other book; Rice’s description was inadequate. Sometimes his descriptions contradict themselves. Rice clearly establishes that the bells in the bell tower aren’t rung any more; replaced with a loudspeaker recording instead. Yet in their recall of an early scene in the tower, the neighbor’s recollections differ: one heard the mechanical hum, but no bell, the other heard the bell, but no hum. Typo? And at what age do you stop using the verb “splay,” as in “splayed her napkin”? Finally, one should not be sloppy with the omniscient voice. If you’re not inside someone’s mind, and you say that there are five men yelping and doing a victory dance in the woods, and later, we find that there are four, but one has occasional insanity-driven visits from a ghost, well then, there were four dancers, weren’t there?
Finally, I was not impressed with the poetry in this book. Maybe I’m not mature enough to know good poetry, but the usage here struck me as the kind you might have found in the rip-off and defunct “World of Poetry” society. You may have been invited to join too. “You are probably the next best thing in poetry, and we’re willing to prove it by publishing your piece, sight-unseen in our book, available for $59.95 and crammed full of the crap that gullible people might write.” OK, Rice’s poetry wasn’t that bad, but only once did its use really work, when Stephen faced Brandon at Cannon on the day of the big football game.
But as ramshackle as this plot was, and as soap opera-like as the ending became, young Rice shows promise. His dialog is much better than his setting, so I think we can give him a pass on this book (while we pass on this book) and look forward to the future. One most certainly should give anyone willing to use the Mahler Resurrection in the way that he did a lot of credit!