Christopher Rice - The Vines

Things have been quiet since you left, so maybe the secrets in the soil here are exhausted. But I worry. I worry about bringing others to this place, allowing them to give their hearts to it, if there’s even the slightest chance that something like what we went through could happen again.

But our story is not mine alone to tell. I could always leave out the parts involving you, but still, it doesn’t feel right not to say something to you first, not to ask your permission.

Write me, Blake. Please write me and tell me if I should proceed. Please write me and tell me that you’re OK.

I trust that Felix Delachaise travels with you always, and I hope that he is truly under your command as you promised me he would be. If he is not, if you ever need help, you have a home at Spring House. You have a home with us always.

PS, Speaking of miracles, we have taught Virginie how to read.

Gwendolyn Hall, the scholar mentioned several times in this novel, is a real person, and I’m honored she took the time to correspond with me while I was researching this novel. The Lost Voices Project, however, is fiction. That said, if it were to exist, it would rely heavily on the work Ms. Hall did to compile an extensive database of one hundred thousand enslaved Africans and African Americans.

For invaluable and penetrating reads of The Vines , I’m indebted to David Groff and David Pomerico, as well as my own creative support system: my mother, Anne Rice, and my best friend and cohost of The Dinner Party Show , Eric Shaw Quinn.

The moment she read the manuscript, my agent, Lynn Nesbit, saw straight to the dark truth I tried to portray in this book. She also stuck with me during the various twists and turns on its exciting and sometimes suspenseful path toward publication.

I’m also blessed with excellent representation in the form of my attorney, Christine Cuddy, and my film and TV agent, Rich Green, at Resolution.

Along the way I received excellent counsel from my friends and colleagues Blake Crouch, Barry Eisler, Marcus Sakey, M.J. Rose, Liz Berry, and Gregg Hurwitz. (The always wise counsel of my best friend, Eric Shaw Quinn, is so pervasive throughout my life it almost doesn’t rate a mention. But he likes attention, so I’ll throw his name in one more time.) These fine folks all helped guide me toward new opportunities hiding amid new challenges.

The horror genre itself would still be a strange and forbidding world to me if it weren’t for the excellent friendship and guidance of Michael Rowe, himself a very talented practitioner of scary, scary stories.

I’m smitten with the resourceful and incredibly smart team at 47North and Amazon Publishing. My thanks to Jason Kirk for spearheading the editorial process (and helping me come up with synonyms for the word slut , a word this novel was apparently full of when I first turned it in) and to Daphne Durham, Katie Finch, and Daniel Slater for introducing me to the exciting new world of Amazon Publishing.

When I published my last novel, The Heavens Rise , I left a very important person off of the acknowledgments page. Her name is Amy Loewy. She gave that novel a deep and thorough editorial read, and then I forgot to mention her. I bought her a nice dinner while I was in New Orleans, and I talked about her on Facebook a bunch, but still, I make it my business to give credit where credit is due. So thank you, Amy. Thanks to you and Britton for everything.

After two years, The Dinner Party Show, the Internet radio program I started with my cohost, Eric Shaw Quinn, has continued to be a joy and a challenge, and I’m grateful for the team that makes it happen every weekend. That team includes my cohost, Eric Shaw Quinn (again, of course), Brandon Griffith, Benjamin Scuglia, Jasun Mark, and Brett Churnin. Thanks, guys, for making sure Eric and I are even louder than usual every Sunday evening at 8:00 p.m. EST, 5:00 p.m. PST. (And the website, in case you ever want to listen, is www.thedinnerpartyshow.com.) And if you aren’t one of our Party People, give us a listen (or a download) and see if we’re your cup of tea. We have fun and we don’t bite the first time you eat with us.

Christopher Rice published his bestselling debut novel, A Density of Souls , when he was twenty-two. By thirty, Rice had published four New York Times bestsellers, received a Lambda Literary Award, and been declared one of People magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive.” His noir thriller Light Before Day was hailed as a “book of the year” by mega-bestselling author Lee Child. His most recent book, The Heavens Rise , was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.

The son of legendary author Anne Rice, he has published short fiction in the anthologies Thriller and Los Angeles Noir . His writing has been featured in the Advocate , the Washington Post , the Los Angeles Review of Books , and on Salon.com. With his friend and cohost, Eric Shaw Quinn, Rice recently launched his own Internet radio broadcast, The Dinner Party Show ( www.thedinnerpartyshow.com).

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2014 Christopher Rice

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by 47North, Seattle

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Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781477826638

ISBN-10: 1477826637

Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014912277