Christopher Rice Presents - The Vines! NY Times Bestselling Author!

BEFORE...

Spring House had its portrait painted many times before it was destroyed by fire. Images of its grand, columned facade are so prevalent throughout gift shops in southern Louisiana most tourists to the region return home with a haunting sense they had visited the place, even if they didn’t take a bus tour of the old plantation houses that line the banks of the Mississippi River.  
Hundreds of years after the conflagration that reduced the antebellum mansion to timbers and weeds, the house and grounds were restored to a more tourist-friendly version of their original splendor by one of the wealthiest families in New Orleans. 
Several of the slave quarters were removed to make room for a quaint gazebo, and the cane fields where African slaves labored and died in the punishing heat were replaced by manicured, fountain-studded gardens that have since played host to countless wedding receptions.

The affluent families who pay for these events feel no meaningful connection to the place’s violent, bloody history; otherwise they would have second thoughts about staging such gleeful celebrations atop soil forced to absorb decades of systematic degradation and assault. No doubt, many of the brides in question grew up in homes where an etching or a painting of Spring House hung in the foyer or the upstairs hallway or, at the very least, the guest bathroom, and they too were seduced, sometimes subliminally, by these ever-present

reproductions of its pastoral sprawl and muscular profile.  But there is one rendering of Spring House that continues to cause dispute among academics, and it is not found in gift shops. The sketch is primitive, but telltale architectural details of the old house are plainly visible: the widow’s walk and the keyhole-shaped front door, to name a few. 
It depicts a gathering of slaves who have been forced to stand and watch while one of their own is whipped by a man who is clearly the overseer. 
The inexplicable event that seems to have interrupted the overseer’s work is a matter of great contention among those devoted to the study of plantation history. 
Some shape has descended from the branches of a nearby oak tree and twined itself through the overseer’s airborne whip, capturing it in midair and bringing a sudden halt to the bound slave’s violent punishment.  Even though it has no signature or date, the academics and tour guides believe this sketch to be the work of one of the many privileged white historians who took it upon themselves to document the personal narratives of freed slaves after the Civil War ended. Perhaps these accounts of misery moved one of these well-intentioned writers to work beyond the limits of his abilities, resulting in a crude illustration meant to manifest the sublimated rage of his interview subjects. Or maybe it is the work of a former slave, who summoned all the steadiness of hand she could manage and put her own revenge fantasy to paper. 
But these scholars are sure the sketch does not depict an actual event. It’s a metaphor, they insist, an angry dream spilled in ink. Of this assertion these students, who devote their lifework to studying the bloody and complex history that runs catacomb-like beneath the bus tours and the spinning racks of postcards and the five-figure weddings, are absolutely sure. 
And they are wrong. 

~~~

The Vines

By Christopher Rice

With a title, The Vines, coming from a writer who sometimes writes horror, it was clear what this story was going to be...  Rice even jokingly shares in his video that vines fighting against humans was a major part...

What you don't know at this point is that...it takes "blood" to cause those vines to come alive... Anything else beyond that would be a spoiler alert since the horror can only be "experienced" as you read--we can not tell you, else you won't believe us... Or, if I tell you, like that old saying, then I'd have to kill you.

The history of the mansion, located in Louisiana, is the key issue. As a working farm in older days, the plantation had many slaves who had worked the land, had died there--had been buried there. When the plantation had burned, it might have been taken as an omen--that the land had received so much pain and blood from those days and needed to be cleansed... But it could not destroy the hate of those who had lived, and died, there...

And that hate could be revived... When something in today's world happens...

Caitlin Chaisson is now living in the new southern home that was built more for living and social life...All the signs of the slaves have been taken away and anything that had disturbed the land had been left for hundreds of years. But there was one old picture found that nobody knew who had painted it. It showed slaves being forced to stand and watch as the overseer punished one of the men...at least until something had pulled out of the woods and twined around the whip being used--stopping everything, caught in that moment of freedom...

But all the evil has not left the plantation--because it is the people who lived there which brought the evil to the home... Caitlin had been hosting a party when she came upon a scene of evil...her husband was having drunken sex with a women who'd attended the party...and when they wanted more, they ran out into a shed to continue their tryst.

Caitlin was devastated--it had been a celebration for her birthday, but had now become a mockery of what was supposed to be with her lover, her husband. Instead, this was her final birthday gift... Caitlin runs from the sight of this betrayal, to the gazebo, where she discovers she has cut herself with the women's champagne glass as she had thrown it to purposely break...

She sat there with the blood dripping onto the floor, remembering how she had heard comments about her looks and why her husband would marry her... But somehow seeing their embraces had been much worse than ever knowing that her husband did not love her... Even her best friend, Blake had tried to tell her, but Caitlin had turned from him, not being willing to believe. Now she knew.

And she uses the broken flute  and cuts into her arm, intending to end her  life...until she hears what is happening at her feet, sees what is happening on the gazebo floor... tendrils are arising up from between the boards of the gazebo, slowly moving toward her, now dripping blood... vines, looking something like a calla lilly...and it suckles her arm, her blood. But it is the smell that overpowers her, a smell...like fire... and she dreams?

And so she has no time to wait. She must bring herself to the very raw edge of her power, the place where she can feel a writhing, feral chaos in the darkness on the other side.  The darkness below. The darkness underfoot...

But when the door to the slave quarters behind her blows open, she sees neither the overseer nor Spring House’s bastard owner. She sees a perfectly framed view of her husband, Troy Mangier, halfway out of his suit, bare ass flexing as he drives himself into the beautiful young woman. And Caitlin feels herself jostled inside of her dreaming point of view—who was it? A slave?  The past and present have met in a fever dream...

And when she awakes, her arm is no longer bleeding--it is almost healed...

Caitlin feels a strange new power...and she knows exactly what to do with her new friends, the vines...


It is easy to see why Rice is a best-selling author...The Vines is edgy, creepy, and yet totally involving so that the story, through the main character's eyes, makes perfect sense... But with her best friend coming back into her life, even though she had pushed him away when he'd shared what he knew about her husband, Blake proves a true friend, as he works with her, dealing with what is actually happening... 

With a bit of fantasy, sci-fi, as well as horror, Rice presents a horrifying, exciting tale of what may happen when evil enters into and controls the land it has claimed. On the other hand, how the book ends if quite an extraordinary story in itself and, to me, proves that their is both vengeance and renewal that is possible... Given that today's headlines talks about a governor who is being questioned on being racist, we find that there is still more to learn about the uneasy relationship between Black and White people... Sometimes, The Vines helps make decisions for us... 

Memorable, remarkable in its merge of history with the present, and a lesson for all of us in many ways... This is one of my favorites of his books... Highly recommended.


GABixlerReviews

Christopher Rice is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Award and is the New York Times bestselling author of A DENSITY OF SOULS and the Bram Stoker Award finalists THE HEAVENS RISE and THE VINES. He is the head writer and an executive producer of "The Vampire Chronicles", a television show based on the bestselling novels by his mother, Anne Rice. Together they penned RAMSES THE DAMNED: THE PASSION OF CLEOPATRA, a sequel to her bestselling novel THE MUMMY OR RAMSES THE DAMNED. BONE MUSIC, the first installment in his new Burning Girl series, was released March 1st, 2018, and the sequel, BLOOD ECHO, will be released in February 2019. With his best friend, New York Times bestselling novelist Eric Shaw Quinn, Christopher hosts the YouTube channel THE DINNER PARTY SHOW WITH CHRISTOPHER RICE & ERIC SHAW QUINN (#TDPS). THE DINNER PARTY SHOW began as a podcast and Internet radio show. You can download and stream all of their episodes at www.TDPS.tv. He lives in West Hollywood, California. Visit him at www.christopherricebooks.com.

Author photo credit: Cathryn Farnsworth Photography