Dark lords: are gay readers more attracted to gothic stories? Literary minds collide as veteran author and artist Clive Barker talks to Christopher Rice about his second novel, The Snow Garden. (books).

When Christopher Rice published his first novel, A Density of Souls, in 2000 at age 21 and made no secret of the fact that he's gay, fellow out novelist Clive Barker was there to support and encourage him. Barker seemed the perfect mentor: Rice's book dealt with a dark, sexual secret among four prep school friends in gothic New Orleans; Barker's diverse and impressive output as a novelist, filmmaker, and painter has encompassed fantasy, horror, and the very real dark side of human sexuality.

To mark the publication of Rice's second novel, The Snow Garden--a labyrinthian tale of murder and secret sexual liaisons among a group of college freshmen [see review, page 63]--The Advocate invited the two writers to get together again to discuss their common interests; Rice's successful emergence from the shadow of his famous mother, Anne Rice; and what's wrong with young gay men today.

You've used the word gothic [in connection with The Snow Garden]. The Advocate wanted me to ask, Do you think gay men and women, by and large, like the gothic more? Do you as a writer find it appealing in a way that you wouldn't if you were straight?

Yes. I don't really know what gothic means, but it seems to imply a prevailing sense of doom. And that's what being a young gay man in high school was for me--a prevailing sense of doom, that tragedy or danger awaited around every corner: Violence from the homophobic jocks or the danger of making a sexual advance to the wrong guy. And the essence that's also in the gothic [is] the fact that the beautiful can be deadly--

And decadent and rotted--

Yeah. And the only way to achieve satisfaction is through extreme decadence, covert decadence, as well. Kind of purgings of your desire. But then New Orleans [the setting for A Density of Souls] is a big contributor to that for me because it is a city of decay, decaying history.

With The Snow Garden, I think you superbly averted or sidestepped the most difficult problem [in following up a successful first novel]: the problem of somebody saying, "Well, gee, it's not like A Density of Souls, is it?" To which your answer is going to be, "Well, of course it isn't. It's not meant to be."

Yes. It had to be different because the the setting was different. Setting is so important to me. In A Density of Souls, New Orleans was a major character in the book. And in The Snow Garden, Atherton--this fictional town that is inspired by Providence, R.I. [where Rice attended Brown University]--is also a major character in this book. But the difference--and this was an incredible challenge in writing it--is that in A Density of Souls, I had a whole city to play with. The first half of The Snow Garden, in my opinion, is really driven by building claustrophobia. You're with these kids in their stark dormitory, and there's a sense that the closer they get to one another, the less they'll be able to keep from one another and things are just going to explode. And maintaining that level of tension in the setting was incredibly hard.

You've also got really wonderful character studies--I enjoyed immensely the moral complexities. I wondered whether you'd gone after a badder book, a book which had just a real quality of villainy about it.

You know, who really inspired it was my father, who was a college professor for, I guess, 21 years. He once said to me, "There is nothing more terrifying than someone in their 20s who believes every single one of their convictions." And so I saw--ill my one year at Brown University--I saw a potential for real--

Villainy.

--villainy on a college campus.

So this does come, to some extent, out of your experience.

Yeah--in a variety of different ways too. When I got to Brown, my group of friends were not united by a political cause. We weren't all gay. We weren't all straight. We weren't taken up into the fold, as it were. But at the same time, some of us were coming out of the closet. I was. I mean, it was a tremendously liberating experience. But we kind of regarded anyone who immediately got sucked up into an instant identity with great suspicion.

Because it was likely to be fake in some way or another? Or likely to be empowering in the wrong kind of way?

It would empower you too quickly, yes. It would be a quick fix-it and convince you that you had developed into a full-fledged adult faster than you really had. And it might subsume you.

One of the things I love about your writing is how people just pop up, and suddenly here they are and they feel very real. [You've said that] Michael [in The Snow Garden] is an embodiment of a very extreme form of gay, moneyed white male in New York right now. You're fearless about writing about gay men in a very much less than attractive fashion. [Laughs]

I think young gay men right now are in a state of flux and transition. And I think too many of them to go unmentioned are leading pretty lousy lives and treating each other pretty horribly. I see young gay men whose value systems seem highly questionable to me. The major character of the book, Randall Stone, is one of them. Yet because he has such deeper secrets that transcend sexuality, he also has an outsider's perspective on the gay community of this college campus, and so he makes a lot of wry, biting, and bitter statements about them. At one point he calls them scholars and activists by day, muscle-hungry whores by night. But that's also coming from his point of view as a character and not necessarily mine.

Good point. But if one puts all these pictures together--Randall, you, who Michael is, Jesse [Randall's hunky roommate]--it seems to me there is some part of you, Chris, speaking, because there are so many characters who either view these behavior patterns as grotesque or else prove that they're grotesque by their behavior. So are you pissed off by that [behavior], deep in you? And will it have gone by the time you finish this book tour, and you'll be on to something else?

I think it might be gone by the end of this book tour, because the last book tour was all about me sort of furthering the statement that young gay men were some of the most tortured people on the planet and that any gay man who had to endure high school went through hell. Victim, victim, victim, wah wah wah wah wah. And by the end of the book tour I was like, "Wait a minute. The fat girl didn't have any fun either. High school was a private hell for everyone. We weren't the only ones who suffered."

Though you are really good in the public setting, you seem to me fundamentally shy. Am I wrong?

I am. I'm a shy person. I'm not a social person. It takes effort for me to leave my apartment. [Laughs] It takes a lot of effort for me to maintain a romantic involvement, which I haven't been very good at. And yeah, the pit of my stomach just curls up, falls out, whenever I do a reading or get up to make a speech. But then something wonderful happens. Because I get so nervous that I'm as tightly wound as I can be, and I just unravel. Because there's nowhere else to go after that. You can't get more nervous--that would be cardiac arrest. So it ends up being a kind of exhilarating roller-coaster ride: going on a book tour, doing a speaking engagement.

Were you tired of hearing your own voice at the end of the last tour?

I was so tired of my own voice. I wanted to go home and shut the door and just stay in my room, and [instead] I had to write a second book. [Laughs]

Was that contractual?

Yes, it was. And I did it on purpose because I wanted to do everything in my power to prevent myself from being a one-book guy. No one was more surprised by the attention that [A Density of Souls] got than I was. I didn't think it would sell the way it did, because it was so gay. I didn't think it would get the mainstream attention. I was not ready to be a role model for young gay men. And I was not ready to be any kind of politician, which is what I was asked to be.

We had this debate about talking about your mom in this interview.

It just seemed to me like you might be very well over that now.

There will be a point when I won't want to answer questions about it anymore. But I'm still 23 years old. She is very influential on me, if not stylistically--I'm not referring to her subject matter--then as a figure. She's still my mommy. And she's a topic that I consider open for discussion. But after this second book, the question that really makes me really just turn red is, "Are you still around because of who your mother is?" My response to that is, "If that's all I had going for me, A Density of Souls would have evaporated within 10 minutes." I mean, people were just waiting for me to be nothing, for there to be no story there, no characters--just a collection of pages bound together with a famous name on it.

Do you think reviewers to any degree came after you? I know the reviews were by and large very positive. I read perhaps one not-so-positive one. But you think when people came after you, they came after you because there was a family connection? I mean, do you think that was an issue?

Yes. I think even if they didn't say it, that was behind it.

The haters.

I think book reviewers have a natural suspicion of any buzzed book, any hyped book. Even glowing reviews of a novel like The Corrections, which is the darling book right now, start off with "I was prepared not to like The Corrections because of all the buzz." Mine was a buzzed book. So they had their knives drawn. And I think sins made by first novelists that are sometimes forgiven were not forgiven in my case because of who I was.

That's a very elegant way to put it. And a very generous way to put it ... I don't have any advice to give any writer. This is not advice, but does Hollywood call?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Is this a call that will be answered? Are they calling you? Miramax is there, and all of that good stuff.

[Laughs] No, I'm getting some interest in The Snow Garden as a film.

One other question: This is an incredibly melancholy book. It's not a book I could have written at 23. Where does that incredible sadness come from? Is that you? Are you that sad?

I had two major losses when I was young. And one of them was the discovery that I had a sister [who had died that] I never knew even lived. I found out by accident. A teacher in school slipped and mentioned it, thinking that I had full knowledge of it. And I didn't. At age 6 it didn't even sink in, but then by 10 the questions started. And then at the age of 15 a close friend of mine committed suicide, which came out of nowhere. So there were those two big infusions of loss and death very early on in life. And I had two parents who were very willing to discuss both of them openly. There was no sort of whispering about it or "Let's not talk about that at the table." Maybe I have this darkness about me that I don't personally see as that dark. But I think on another level, The Snow Garden is almost the opposite of A Density of Souls in that A Density of Souls was this fantastical, kind of incredibly wishful book where you know the young victimized gay kid gets the football player. The Snow Garden is about characters who maybe had those dreams and they didn't come true.

I think it was said about [Francis Ford] Coppola, "Those that the gods wish to destroy they make famous young." You're 23. Since we last talked, I've seen you in a thousand places. How is fame feeling?

Very strange. Because it makes you question, as a writer, Can you remain the fly on the wall, the observer? I was recently at an event in New York where I was being honored. I did a red carpet for the first time ever--with the flashbulbs going off--and then walked into this event where everyone's eyes were on me. And I wondered, Does that [kind of attention] prevent you from walking away with the necessary perceptions a writer needs to re-create it later? The fact that you've been the subject of this hot glare of attention, that's the scariest part about it to me.

Do you find that there is some part of it that you actually like--the red carpet, being honored? I mean, that's got to feel good, no?

Yeah, it feels good. But with all the accolades and being honored, there is that kind of threat just under the surface of "You better keep it up. You better do something other than be cute."

You're no longer invisible. Do you think that your melancholy will be touched by that too?

No. There was an awful review of The Snow Garden published recently, and my father read it and he said, "Cut this out and put it on your wall and look at it and say, `This is who I'm fighting.'" Creation comes out of a kind of endless anger and a discontentment with the way the world works and a desire to change it. Not to fix it but to alter it or to influence it. So if that anger ever goes away, I'm not quite sure where my ambition and my drive would come from. I feel happy living in L.A. I feel like I've started a new life, one that has promise. But I'll always feel a bit of distance between me and the rest of the world.

--With additional reporting by Daniel Vaillancourt

Read more of Clive Barker's conversation with Christopher Rice at www.advocate.com

Barker's 15th novel, Coldheart Canyon, was recently published by HarperCollins.