The Vines by Christopher Rice delivers unexpected lyricism that’s impossible to put down

The Vines by Christopher Rice

It’s a rare book that defies your expectations and transcends the genre you were expecting when you first opened the page. This is what Christopher Rice’s new novel, The Vines, did for me. What I thought was a straightforward paranormal tale is actually a lyrical, literary novel that melds sci-fi, familial drama and current affairs. Not an easy feat for any story.

The cover and synopsis of The Vines promise a dark mystery set on an old southern plantation, where a wife finds her husband cheating and unknowingly unleashes dark forces that dwell beneath her gazebo. All of this is true. But the story dives much deeper, giving us complicated characters with their own unique paths. Caitlin is the heiress and wife, whose husband vanishes without a trace after she watches him having an affair. Nova is the daughter of the handyman, who teams up with Blake (Caitlin’s best friend and a survivor of a brutal homophobic attack) to try and solve the mystery. I’ll give you a hint: it involves vines.

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It’s Rice’s style that makes the novel stand out from other paranormal tales of its ilk. There have been many nature-consuming-humans stories before (The Ruins, by Scott Smith, comes immediately to mind), but never have I read a paranormal novel that switches points of view quite so frequently and effectively. The use of tense and perspective that Rice chose also sets it apart—present tense is exceedingly popular these days, but it’s rarely, if ever, paired with third-person perspective. Even when we’re jumping between characters, we stay in the present, in the action, and the choice by Rice is bold, a little disconcerting, and compulsively readable.

The Vines was published through 47North, an imprint of Amazon Publishing that launched only three years ago. It explains why there are no plans to publish the novel in hard cover, but it might also explain just how Rice was able to make such interesting, stylistic choices in his story. These are choices that elevate his book from simply being a ‘paranormal’ novel and, in reality, make it hard to categorize at all.

Traditional publishing loves boxes—those neat categories that books can slot easily into, like ‘science fiction,’ or ‘fantasy.’ It makes things clearer for the reader, and makes it much easier to shelve a novel at Barnes & Noble. But the danger in categorizing genre so severely is that risky stories aren’t always rewarded—when you’re counting on selling a million books, you need to make sure you’re giving readers exactly what they paid for. It’s why indie presses have become an outlet for authors who don’t always fit neatly into any one category: smaller presses are often more willing to take a risk on riskier books.

But where does 47North fit in? These days, Amazon is not exactly the David to the Goliath of traditional publishing. In fact, they’re just as much of a giant, swaying the industry in ways that aren’t always fair or ethical. But in a world where imprints for speculative fiction (horror, sci-fi, fantasy and paranormal) are hard to find, it’s encouraging to see one with the backing of a powerful business like Amazon—and one that is clearly willing to buy a novel that doesn’t necessarily stick to just one genre.

It doesn’t hurt that Chris Rice is already a bestselling author, or that the book is so beautifully written. Rice, son of legendary novelist Anne Rice, clearly has his mother’s gift for pairing lyrical prose with paranormal storylines. As risks go, he’s a pretty low one. But The Vines still defies category, something that makes his novel interesting, though maybe not very easy to market. And these days, that can sometimes be a death sentence in publishing. I’m glad that it’s not the case for Rice, or The Vines, or even 47North. Maybe it tells us that the future of books lies in these imprints ,who are willing to look beyond labels and simply deliver us a lovely, creepy story that’s impossible to put down.