The Snow Garden [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Christopher Rice (Author), James Daniels (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 10, 2003

Atherton University, freshman year. Kathryn, Randall, and Jesse come from different worlds, but find themselves drawn together in unexpected ways. For each of them, college promises a bright future and a way to disconnect from a dark, haunted past. But as winter sets in, their secret histories threaten to disrupt the layers of deceit that protect their fragile new lives. One dark night a professor's wife is found drowned in an icy river, and rumors of murder threaten the safe haven of Atherton. Within days, Randall's illicit affair with the professor is about to be revealed in the local press. Then, an old mystery emerges from the shadows - the discovery of a co-ed's corpse in a frozen creek twenty years before makes these accidents of the past and the present look a little too closely connected. Gradually, the three friends find themselves snared in a web of lies, a web spun long before their days at Atherton. Snowbound on the university campus, they are unwitting captives of a malevolent force that drives them inexorably toward the "snow garden" of the title - a place of nightmares that is all too real, and all too near.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Life imitates art imitates late-night cable TV in Rice's second college gothic novel (after A Density of Souls). Set in the histrionic, pansexual pharmacopoeia that is freshman year at fictional Atherton University, it follows the secret dramas of Kathryn, a San Francisco waif on the run from dark sexual secrets back home; her black, militant lesbian roommate, April; her best friend, Randall, a mysterious, gay, Gucci-clad prince; his roommate, Jesse, an enigmatic and apparently irresistible (straight? bi? predatory?) sex god; Tim, gay muckraker for the campus paper; and Dr. Eric Eberman, an art history professor with a theory about Hieronymus Bosch which, the author seems to suggest, has something to do with the plot. Eberman is sleeping with Randall, and the news of his wife's sudden demise makes for a panicky recall of events of nearly 20 years ago. Randall, having just broken up with Tim, is finding it harder and harder to resist Jesse's mysterious magnetism, but in order to find out whether Eric is a murderer, starts sleeping with Tim again to probe Eric's past. Kathryn finds herself drawn to one of Eric's misfit grad students, and April, who seems to exist merely to counterbalance the XY pH of the overall bitches' brew of the book, makes an observation about Kathryn that might well be applied to the author himself: "... you like drama. Epic, who-shot-JR drama." Said tendency muddles what might otherwise have been a decent gay-themed mystery, but readers may not want to relive freshman year for 400 pages in order to learn whodunit. Agent, Lynn Nesbit. (Feb. 13)Forecast: The son of Anne and Stan has enough of a following to guarantee respectable sales, bolstered by a 15-city author tour, national advertising and a teaser chapter in the paperback of A Density of Souls.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Son of the bewitching Anne Rice, the author follows his first novel, A Density of Souls, with a second that is just as rife with murder, fear, madness, and homoeroticism. Unfortunately, it is also a histrionic hodgepodge, all set on a snowbound college campus in the Northeast. Respected Atherton University professor Eric Eberman seems devastated when his wife, Lisa, drives her Volvo into the icy Atherton River and drowns. Was it a drunken accident or suicide? This question and many more erupt into scandal when the small university town discovers that Professor Eberman has been sleeping with one of his male students, Randall Stone. Randall comes to suspect that Lisa's death was not accidental, and subsequently he and his tightly knit group of college friends go through tremendous amounts of angst, haunted by sexual desires and obscure fears and just generally all worked up. Rice tries to imbue this pretty much plotless novel with an aura of foreboding, but it just ends up being tiresome. Stick with mom. Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio Paperback Audiobooks; Abridged edition (January 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587887347
• ISBN-13: 978-1587887345
• Product Dimensions: 13.4 x 5.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (120 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,718,165 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Rice is the son of author Anne Rice and the late poet Stan Rice. He lives in Los Angeles. The Moonlit Earth is his fifth novel.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Shows his age...., May 2, 2006

By 

Tim Brough "author and music buff" (Springfield, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Snow Garden (Mass Market Paperback)

Christopher Rice's second novel is everything that you expect from a young, precocious and ambitious author. Problem is, that is NOT a good thing. While "The Snow Garden" does have a fair amount going for it - as a mystery, the final third kicks into high gear - the book leans heavily towards pretentious. While, as a gay man, I like that gay characters can be presented as protagonists, Rice seems more intent on making them mouthpieces for his own philosophies. And please, spare me any more writings that think all straight guys will go down if they just meet the right man? Augh!

But it also means that you are slogging through two thirds of a mystery that plods like flip-flops in the slush. Some of the twists are more than a little preposterous (the disappearance of Jesse made me stop and double-back to see if I'd missed something), characters underdeveloped and hackneyed, unnecessary sub-plots slip in and are discarded, and as others have noted, the proof-readers of my hardback edition must have been tipping at the Scotch too often. Genders switch, as does a character name at one point. Forget minor errors, this was the speed reading equivalent of nailing a pot-hole. Quite frankly, if there wasn't a famous last name attached here (hey, it was what first drew me in), "The Snow Garden" would likely be spoken of as a sophomore outing by a promising writer who needed to lose the pretensions. Here's hoping Christopher Rice does a little woodshedding before book three.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars There is a good story in here somewhere...., December 6, 2003

By 

Review Lover "ReviewLover" (At a place...) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Snow Garden (Paperback)

Christopher Rice's writing has nothing to do with his mother, the notorious Anne Rice. There, it's said. They have two totally separate styles of writing and different ways of establishing mood - Anne's is a florid and descriptive style, Christopher appears to rely more on enigmatic character interaction to set the mood. That is all, no arguing.

Now, on with the review. 'The Snow Garden' tells the story of Randall and Kathryn, two friends from college, each struggling to come to terms with dark secrets from their respective troubled pasts. Part coming-of-age tale, part murder-mystery, part gay in-jokes and stereotyping, a potentially strong narrative becomes mired and wasted in what is essentially 400+ pages of overly emotive dialogue.

As a second novel, 'The Snow Garden' isn't too bad, being neither better nor worse than his first, 'A Destiny of Souls'. The principal characters, too, are of a type - tortured, moody, self-important adolescents with tangible egos - but are clearly identifiable. Shame, then, that Rice hasn't made them in the slightest bit endearing, opting instead for an almost comedic stereotyping. There are traces here and there of a strong narrative, stemming from a very well-concieved murder-mystery, but unfortunately a decent idea for a plot can't compensate for the cast of thousands of thoroughly soulless, one-dimensional characters.

The problem with Rice's second novel is that after a hundred pages or so, we begin to feel a sense of what is unmistakably a personal vendetta - Rice wants us desperately to agree with his apparently personal views on pansexuality - and this is where the novel begins to grind to a halt. Rehashing the same experiences for all of his characters over and over again, reading Rice's words becomes a chore, and it really isn't until the final fifty pages or so that anything major happens in the story, by which time we're scanning paragraphs so quickly that we don't really care. The sub-plot explaining why Kathryn is so emotionally stunted is not properly explored, with the most cursory of nods to why she feels the way she does. Randall's past (and the whole climax of the book) comes to light in such a stagey, theatrical fashion that it rings totally false, and we cannot easily believe that a teen with such a dramatic life could now be so totally unengaging. He drinks and smokes, presumably to indicate a sense of living-on-the-edge cool, but Rice never seems to give us a decent, believable reason for it.

In face, it's this proposed sense of gritty, urbane coolness that is the major flaw with 'The Snow Garden'. We can't believe that these characters could have come from anywhere other than a spoiled, upper-class background, and we like them all the less for it. Beverly Hills 9021-snore. Hopefully, future novels won't be crammed full of pedantic and unbelievable characters, and Rice's essentially sound plotlines will be allowed to shine through.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Tedious, June 30, 2002

By 

nancy plouse (Hummelstown PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Snow Garden: A Novel (Hardcover)

What a tedious, poorly written, more poorly edited read this was! I kept plugging away thinking there'd be something redeeming sooner or later. There wasn't.