Earth Survey

Many years ago, I read the debut novel from Christopher Rice, A Density of Souls. He's just a couple years younger than I am, and was in his early 20s at the time he published that book. Then as now, I dreamed of one day getting my own novel published. I expect I read the book almost hoping not to like it. I imagine I thought it would boost my own ego to know that the only reason he got published as such a young age was that he has a famous writing mother, Anne Rice; knowing he'd gotten published with a "bad book" would in some warped way bolster my own writing ambitions.

Instead, it turned out to be a rather good book. (And I've since come to understand that the greatest obstacle at the moment to my grand career as an author is my own lack of buckling down and actually doing the writing.) In a distant recess of my mind, I resolved to check out future books from Christopher Rice, once he got around to writing them. That recess must have been quite deep, because it's a decade later and he's written four more novels since then. In any case, I finally remembered that old mental note and decided to read his newest effort, The Moonlit Earth.

This novel is a bit of a mystery thriller revolving around a woman whose younger brother appears to have been involved in a terrorist attack, and has since gone missing. She's determined to get to the bottom of his strange behavior and exonerate him, but finds even more mysteries within her own family the more she digs.

To whatever degree Christopher Rice has a reputation, it's as a gay writer. He's been out since he published his first book, and I understand that each of his books includes a significant gay character. This book is interesting, in that the fact the younger brother is gay is somehow both pivotal to the plot and entirely incidental. I don't think I can really explain how that works without revealing more of the plot than I care to, but suffice it to say that it's a skillfully navigated dichotomy.

A less successful dichotomy is that of the two mysteries at play in the novel. The story starts out with a grand mystery of grand scope -- what was the reason behind this terrorist attack? There's a strong personal element too -- how was the brother really involved in it? But by the final act of the story, those mysteries have been supplanted by the characters' own family history. There's a mystery in their past as well, and solving that becomes the more important issue in the book. The transition between these puzzles isn't quite smooth, and can't help but feel like a reduction in scope as things move from a global to a personal stage.

But this latter mystery is just as compelling in its own way. You do become invested enough in the characters to care about the drama of their past being exposed. I was still interested in seeing how it all ended even after the book had made it clear that the things I started out being interested in weren't the most important things. Rice has a brisk and easy to read style of writing that pulls you quickly through his tale. I never marveled at a clever word choice or ingenious sentence, but I also never questioned the characters as real people. It's believable writing, if not showy.

I rate The Moonlit Earth a solid B. Christopher Rice has definitely made his own way, a separate writer from his mother, and I plan to check out more of his books.