The Vines

Contrary to what most critics seem to think, there are a lot of different ways to write a great book, and a lot of different kinds of great writing. Despite higher minded literary pretensions, the purpose of the novel at its core should always be to entertain, and ideally it can entertain on multiple levels. The Vines, the latest novel from Christopher Rice, is the best kind of book. On one hand, it can be enjoyed purely as the great time that it is. There is a lot going on here. Lying! Cheating! Deception! Scandal! Murder! Betrayal! Ghosts! Witches! And this is all within the first ten pages. This is an over the top novel, very much in the fine southern tradition of grandiose splendor, but with insane horror trappings. I'm all about this, and would have been well satiated with nothing more. This is the top layer of The Vines. But, as one of the characters says early in the book, we are "So busy looking for ghosts in the attic, we never think to look in the ground." The ground, the earth, the soil, the dirt, and the grit of what lies hidden beneath the immediacy of the distracting surface is very much the core of this story. Like the menace that lies beneath the beauty and glamor of Spring House, the real meat of this story lies beneath what you might get on a casual reading. Christopher, despite the amusing snarkiness of his social media presence (for a good time, visit his Facebook page) clearly takes his work and his art very seriously, and lets his fiction speak for itself. Beneath the chaos and fun of killer plants and bugs, Rice is actually saying some very interesting things here about the nature of life, love, class, family, privilege, friendship, sexuality, and race. In my review of Rice's last novel, The Heavens Rise (http://geeksout.org/blogs/ranerdin/book-review-heavens-rise-christopher-...) I cited the friendship between the two main characters -- a black woman and a white gay man -- as the high point. In The Vines, the two central characters -- Nova, the daughter of Spring House's groundskeeper, and Blake, the best friend of the current owner of the house, share these same external traits with last year's characters but little else. This is a much more unlikely pair, an example of two people with little in common being circumstantially thrown together and I think the tensions and awkwardness between them create a very interesting dynamic throughout the story. Earlier this year, a series of nasty open letter arguments were posted back and forth on the internet highlighting some of the tensions between black women and white gay men. Of course, as these things tend to play out, a great chance for an interesting dialogue turned into an oppression pissing contest and a chance for gay men to unleash their latent sexism and racism. In this novel, there are a couple of very tense conversations between these two characters, and these were done in a way that was very uncomfortable and very real. It never feels like we're witnessing "a very special episode" where we're taught a valuable lesson, but rather like we're intruding on the private and complex thoughts of two real people trying to live through their own painful and personal experiences. These little details in the context of a horror novel are really what help sell some of the crazier supernatural elements of the story, and I commend Rice for how he balanced these moments. Horror fiction is still pretty starved for well rounded characters that aren't straight white men, and I appreciate that Rice brings diversity to the front and center of his stories in a very honest and human way. On a personal level, when I was first struggling to write stories of my own as a teenager, I really appreciated that I could go to Christopher's novels for examples of gay men doing things besides pining after football players in the high school locker room. In the same way that Carrie is not a horror story about a straight woman, and is about a woman who happens to be straight, Rice's novels aren't about gay people, but about people who happen to be gay, and this might not seem like an important distinction to make, but for a young gay writer without many role models or examples to look for outside of erotic fiction, this was and remains very important to me. But let's not forget that this is a horror novel, and we need something to scare the crap out of these people I've been discussing. It's hard to create "new" monsters in horror. There's a school of thought that basically narrows all monsters down to variations of the same handful of tropes (ghost, vampire, creature). Rice has done something very original and, frankly, pretty damn cool here. The most obvious comparison to make, at first, is to John Wyndham's carnivorous triffids. But remember, this is the south. Compare Wyndham's wonderful but somewhat technical British prose to the way they do creepy plants in Louisiana: "Not snakes, not the fingers of some subterranean beast. Vines. That's all. But once she's whispered these words aloud -- flowers and leaves -- the words only deepen her paralysis, because by then she can see that the blossoms, each one about the size of her hand, are opening in unison. They look like the flowers of a calla lily, but inside of their four, evenly sized white petals is an insect-like amalgam of stamens and filaments, and all of it glows with an interior radiance so powerful it looks like it might drift away, spirit-like, from the temporary prison of the petals.And each blossom, each impossibly animated, pulsing blossom, is pointed directly at her.They're looking at me." And later, "Caitlin brings the flower to her nose and inhales. Its scent is something akin to charred sugar, sweet and smoky and a little cloying. Then comes a loamy undertone, an intoxicating compromise between turned dirt and the taste she'd often discover just below her husband's armpit during sex." So no, these vines have very little in common with their no-nonsense British cousins. This probably doesn't come as a surprise, but Rice writes about the south, and specifically Louisiana, very well. I can feel the cloying stickiness of the vegetation and the dirt, the magnificent over the top flowering of vegetation that makes its home under the opulence of an old southern mansion. Spring House and its grounds become characters in their own right, occasionally reminding me of some of the best parts of Anne Rivers Siddons's excellent southern horror novel The House Next Door. Without giving anything away, as Rice develops the nature of the vines further, the story takes some interesting turns as we learn the true nature of what animates and drives their vengeful blood-thirst. For anyone that's ever read Robert McCammon's wonderful novel Swan Song, there's a particularly interesting "what-if?" here, if you've ever wondered about what would happen if Swan decided to use her gift for making plants grow for...nastier purposes. For the grittier horror fan in me, there's also some really cool killer bug imagery at one point. Like I said, this book has everything. By this point, Christopher Rice has written novels that span all different genres, but I really feel that The Heavens Rise was a breakthrough moment and that The Vines is his best book yet. As a lifelong and somewhat jaded horror fan, this short novel hit every single one of my sweet spots in the one wild night I spent with it and left me sore, exhausted, and incredibly satisfied as I watched the sun come up -- with the added bonus of not having to make awkward post-coital small talk. Like all the best horror books, I went to bed slightly jumpy, as the wind outside caused me to give a nervous side-eye to the branches of the trees as they flung their leaves into the brisk October morning. Rating: A @robrussin

3.5As I said in my Goodreads review of A DENSITY OF SOULS, Christopher Rice’s novels are a guilty pleasure for me. They’re loopier than all hell on a Tilt-a-Whirl, and THE VINES is no exception. (You know how one chilling sentence, “Sometimes, dead is better,” perfectly sums up PET SEMATARY? Yeah, well, dare you to try that with a Chris Rice novel.)Imagine a precocious little kid constructing an ice cream sundae. He begins well. Two scoops of vanilla, a drizzle of chocolate sauce, another of caramel. Although a can of whipped cream stands waiting, the kid isn’t ready to use it yet; his creation looks too . . . plain. So he pours a bit of root beer around the ice cream, thrusts a pretzel stick into the bowl. Hm, not bad. The unique combo has promise. Then the kid’s enthusiasm gets the better of him. Pretty soon those twin domes of ice cream have ramen noodles and sauerkraut for hair, olives for eyes, boiled shrimp for ears, and a dollop of ketchup for color (and because the kid just likes ketchup).I get the feeling this is how Chris Rice composes a novel. (SPOILERS FOLLOW.)THE VINES gets off to a great start, a focused start. Rice is an adept prose stylist with a vivid imagination. The setting and characters immediately come alive, and the premise, as it develops, is intriguing.Thick vines that have lain dormant within the soil of an antebellum plantation become homicidally enlivened by the current owner’s blood-borne rage. (Blood-borne, I guess, because urine and/or cuss words aren’t creepy enough.) The vines’ origin has something to do with a long-dead, vengeful female slave whose magic allowed her to control nature.Now granted, the vengeful-slave backstory is about as trite as a haunted house built on an Indian burial ground. In this case, it’s also short on detail and nuance, and involves an unlikely bargain struck between said slave and her master. But I was hooked by that point, so I eagerly pressed on -- even as the author kept heaping more and more ingredients onto his promising little sundae.But I should’ve anticipated this after having read A DENSITY OF SOULS. You see, Mr. Rice and Mr. Restraint have never been properly introduced. And he isn’t much of a plotter, like, say, Dennis Lehane. (Oh, I love me some Dennis Lehane! The man is brilliant.)Anyway, a flower soon erupts from the eponymous vine(s). Mysterious “obsidian” bugs of varying sizes are drawn to the flower. White and multicolored lights periodically blaze. As more people die, more and bigger flowers appear, and the otherworldly insects congregate in huge, deafening swarms with choreographed movements (by Bug Fosse, no doubt). Their primary purpose is to consume the people who enliven the vines and then pollinate the flowers with their rage (I assume, ‘cause this whole process isn’t explained very clearly). As a result, the rage-pollinated flowers produce more potentially murderous vines (I assume, ‘cause no fruit is ever produced). Growing more vines seems rather pointless, though, considering how few people are likely to wake up these buried botanical curiosities by bleeding on them.But wait! It appears the bugs, too, can kill people, and not just the ones who feed vitriol-infused blood to the vines. Why? Because the author changes the rules, that’s why. Now it’s “ghosts” moving throughout the entire fabric of creation that can take on any eldritch form they choose and wreak havoc with the living.With that startling revelation, the vines and blood and bugs become more or less irrelevant. And at least one reader ends up hopelessly confused.The motives of the remaining characters become ever murkier; their actions, ever more puzzling. Since the characters aren’t particularly well-developed, I don’t much give a crap. I just want to know how the novel ends. Then a ghost that hadn’t received any previous mention, except as a living person in the backstory, suddenly and inexplicably appears (via those multitasking bugs, of course) and confers magical powers on one of the main players. As usual, I’m not sure how or why. My stock of crap-to-give has nearly run out anyway.And so the story goes, devolving over a mere two-day period into a jumble of seemingly impromptu plot elements that make less and less sense until they take on a hallucinogenic quality. The climactic scene, which centers on some kind of crazy shape-shifting, is virtually incomprehensible. I don’t get the epilogue at all.But you know what? I finished the book. And that means Rice’s storytelling has a certain dynamism that can’t be discounted, as loopy as it is.

I liked the twisty turvy story it presented very good characters. Liked it a lot.

***A completely spoiler free review***When I first saw the cover of The Vines, I didn't think twice. I knew I had to have it. And boy was I in for a ride once I began reading the thrilling book that had me quite literally hooked from the first page. This is my kind of novel!Christopher Rice has done an excellent job executing such a dark and twisted tale that I rarely had time to make assumptions and work it all out. I was gripped, shocked, teased and utterly entertained. Christopher takes you on a journey; a spellbinding, horrific trip into a dark, creepy world. The deceitful & scandalous going on's in Spring House only add to the luxury of the reading experience, and you wouldn't believe was lurks beneath.Rice delivers a well written horror novel, that uses rich Southern history as its roots - making the novel sultry and enticing. The whole magic element gives it a whole new dimension, and for someone who lives for truly masterful writing, I feel that Christopher is on top of his game.I thoroughly recommend The Vines to anyone who wants a horror novel with a difference. I promise you, you will NOT be disappointed.

Christopher Rice marries the past and present to create this spooky novel. This book was a fantastic page turner, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

It is imaginative,! But I do prefer his earlier books.

Great read from the amazing Christopher rice would recommend reading this book . ReAlly well written and scary in some parts