Christopher Rice

Christopher Travis Rice, born March 11, 1978, is an American author whose career has moved across suspense, crime, supernatural thriller, and erotic romance. He made his fiction debut in 2000 with the bestselling A Density of Souls, a novel that became a New York Times Best Seller and brought him attention in both gay and mainstream press. As of 2025, he lived in West Hollywood, California.

Rice was born in the San Francisco Bay Area to novelist Anne Rice and poet Stan Rice. His aunt, Alice Borchardt, was also a noted writer of fantasy and historical fiction. He spent the first ten years of his childhood in the Castro District of San Francisco before his family moved to New Orleans, a change he later described in sharp cultural terms: from a San Francisco school where lesbian teachers were addressed by first names to an uptown private elementary school where students went to chapel each morning.

His years at Isidore Newman School, from which he graduated in 1996, helped shape his first novel. Rice has said he was never physically threatened in high school, but his knowledge of his sexuality and his lack of interest in athletics made him feel like an outcast. He began visiting gay bars and clubs during his senior year and came out to his parents after meeting his first boyfriend. His father accepted his sexuality, while his mother initially believed he was bisexual because of his past relationships.

Rice attended Brown University, an experience that inspired his second novel, The Snow Garden, which received a Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Men’s Mystery. During his freshman year he intended to become an actor, then transferred to Tisch School of the Arts to study Dramatic Writing. He did not graduate from either school, choosing instead to move to Los Angeles to explore screenwriting. For many years he also wrote “Coastal Disturbances,” a regular column for the LGBT-related news magazine The Advocate.

Although he early distinguished his work from his mother’s by saying he wrote thrillers rather than horror, Rice later became more comfortable with the supernatural. The Heavens Rise, published in 2013, and The Vines were both nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel. He also wrote the Burning Girl series and, with Anne Rice, co-authored the historical horror novels Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra and Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris. In 2014 he began publishing erotic romance, and in 2021 he announced the pen name C. Travis Rice for romance between men, including the Sapphire Cove novels Sapphire Sunset, Sapphire Spring, and Sapphire Storm.

Rice’s work often returns to identity, belonging, sexuality, and the uneasy pull of place, especially New Orleans. Readers in the gay community responded strongly to the character Stephen in A Density of Souls; Rice said more than a thousand young gay men contacted him to say he had captured what those years felt like for them. His line, “Every day is a bank account, and time is our currency,” has the same directness that runs through much of his public voice: plainspoken, alert to pressure, and aware that every life is measured in the same twenty-four hours.