At the beginning of Christopher Rice’s new novel, “Light Before Day,” a crystal meth lab tucked inside a filthy doublewide trailer in Northern California explodes in a ball of fire. A teacher searching for her student is killed.

The action jumps to the West Hollywood area of Los Angeles, where we are introduced to Adam Murphy, a boozy writer for Glitz magazine who gets fired over a story about a marine helicopter pilot who flew his aircraft into the Pacific.

Murphy is in love with Corey, who disappears and is thought to be a victim of the West Hollywood Slasher. After landing a job with mystery writer James Wilton, Murphy and Wilton search for answers. The search leads them to drug dealers, a meth assassin, pedophiles and hustlers, all ending in a hail of bullets.

“Light Before Day” is a novel that is lightning fast and in your face with its honest take on the seedy side of gay culture in Los Angeles. As with the first two Rice novels, the author weaves seemingly unrelated people and places with surreal events to create a terrifically rich tapestry.

Rice drops few clues along the way until a gasp-inducing moment when all aspects of the story become clear. In this latest novel, Rice leaves behind the gothic tones of his two previous books, “A Density of Souls” and “The Snow Garden” and commits himself to an out-and-out thriller.

Writing in first-person for the first time changes the narrative and the scope of his characters as well. The result is a deeper, better-rounded and ultimately more enjoyable book on every level.

Fans of Rice’s first two books should find more to enjoy here. Newcomers and those who didn’t get the author’s work before this project should give “Light Before Day” a try to see that Rice’s own life lessons have changed him and his work for the better.

In advance of his March 30 visit to Houston, the Houston Voice caught up with Rice recently in a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home.

Houston Voice: So you live in Los Angeles now. What part?
CHRISTOPHER RICE: West Hollywood.

Voice: And you live with your partner, Brian Orter, the photographer who took the photos of you on your Web site, correct?
RICE: That’s him; he’s wonderful. We’ve lived together for two years and been together for three. The first year was long distance. That was brutal.

Voice: But you decided to make it work in Los Angeles?
RICE: It was a combination of circumstances. He was ready to leave New York, having lived there almost his whole life. I said ‘I’m not leaving LA; I just got here.’ It helps. I really like him, and he really likes me. I knew I had found the perfect Jewish husband.

Voice: So with a husband and home, are you still a bar person?
RICE: Not anymore; I’ve changed my wild ways.

Voice: Are you sober?
RICE: Pretty much, yeah.

Voice: A central theme in the new book is addiction: meth addiction, alcohol addiction, sex addiction. Did you go through any changes that are reflected in the new book?
RICE: I experienced a lot of things at once that forced me to grow up. My father became gravelly ill and eventually died. I met someone, who for all intensive purposes I married. Life was happening. Life happened.

It was like I woke up. I settled down, stopped the partying, I had been hard drinking since I was 16. One day I realized I have a really fabulous life and I needed to actually live it rather than avoid it.

Voice: How did that change your writing?
RICE: I was supposed to write a different novel, the sequel to “The Snow Garden.”

Voice: That’s seems surprising for you to want to do a sequel, rather than branch out into something new. … Ultimately I’m so glad I didn’t. I’m glad I’m not locked into characters I created four years ago; my life is so different now.
Some writers like it. They can lock into a long series about one character spanning many novels. There is a certain sense of security in that. I do want to bring Adam and Jimmy back from “Light”. It’ll depend on the public’s reaction.

Voice: The jump from “Snow Garden” to the meth-addicted hustlers and pedophilia is a pretty big one. How did that happen?
RICE: I had written this short story for Genre magazine; I was their fiction editor at the time. It was called “November Brings Fog.” It was different from “Light Before Day,” but it too was about this young gay man who was obsessed with this phantom serial killer named the West Hollywood Slasher.

Voice: Was the lead character still Adam Murphy from “Light Before Day”?
RICE: Yes. I don’t know if he was named the same, but yes. The character who was not in the short story was James Wilton.

Voice: Is he based on your late father (Poet Stan Rice)?
RICE: Yes, very much so. My relationship with my father was largely good. He was a complicated man. We were very close, and it was an adult-adult relationship.
He never treated me like a kid. The father/son relationship between Jimmy and Adam was just a natural by-product of writing the novel so soon after my dad died.

Voice: Do you embrace being called a ‘gay writer’ or are you just a writer and the gay part comes with it?
RICE: I don’t think I have been labeled a gay writer. I’ve never seen a bookstore stock my titles in the gay section. I think the reason writers don’t like that label is that it implies a lower standard for their work. African American writers don’t want to be called that because it implies their work can’t be compared to that of white male writers.

Voice: Is that an unspoken standard?
RICE: I think we’re seeing a migration of a lot of books out of the gay interests section and into the general fiction section. I think that’s a good thing.

Voice: Does it bother you that with mainstreaming of gay content, some of the gay sections in chain retailers are bigger than entire gay and lesbian bookstores?
RICE: It’s upsetting. I don’t know what’s happening to these bookstores or how to save them. If we don’t patronize them for more than just porn, they’re all going to close.

Voice: What does your mother (Novelist Anne Rice) think of “Light Before Day”?
RICE: My mom thought it was wonderful. She had a stronger reaction to this one than the other two. She thought it was about a completely independent and sovereign gay community, a gay community where they were not dependent upon or blaming the straight community for their own problems.

She was very good friends with John Preston, the famous writer who died of AIDS in the 90’s. She used to tell him all the time, “You need to write about what you’re doing for each other in this epidemic.” The Reagan bashing had been done, ya know?

She felt I touched on that in this novel, regarding the relationship between Adam and Nate Bain, how they watch out for one another. She said while Jimmy may be important, he’s not the savior in the end.

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