Christopher Rice speaks on New Orleans, his mother Anne Rice | Entertainment/Life

On a cool Wednesday morning, sunlight slipped through the curtains of a hotel suite in downtown New Orleans, where Christopher Rice was staying for the week.

Starting with the broad balcony overlooking high-rises and a blue sky, he gave a brief tour of the palatial suite before taking a seat at the dining table near a picture window. Black coffee kept arriving in thick-rimmed mugs while two plates of powdered beignets waited nearby. Rice appeared relaxed — dressed in a green knit polo and blue jeans, his brown hair gelled to the side.

It was one of his few idle days in the city he grew up in, after his television appearance that morning, before he would host a celebration at Orpheum Theatre on All Saints Day for his late mother Anne Rice, the New Orleans-born Gothic author best known for her 1976 novel “Interview with the Vampire.”

The celebration of her life took Rice and his longtime collaborator, author Eric Shaw Quinn, about 5 years to create — a process requiring intricate production work that called for “a different side of the brain than the writer’s brain,” he said. The two put together what Rice describes as “an anthology of documentary films” that unfold the life of Anne Rice before and after her fame.

The films trace her early days after moving to Texas, a change that “really broke her heart. She never left New Orleans in her heart,” Rice said. There, she met his father, poet Stan Rice, in high school. The two would eventually pack an old beat-up truck and follow the Beat Generation to San Francisco to become artists. Once her big break came as a novelist in the 1980s, she returned home to New Orleans with her husband.

These are just a few chapters revealed by the documentaries, with the help of roundtable interviews with people who were close to Anne Rice.

Ultimately, the documentary films weave in moments that allow her fans to grieve — they couldn’t do so at a public service when she died during the coronavirus pandemic in 2021 — and “to walk away inspired by the story of her as a person, as a character, as somebody who could not be trampled on, who followed her dreams at all costs,” Rice said.

“We’ve put so much into it. It is like making a movie, which then releases and puts out into the world. What do you do next?” he said. “The answer is: a lot of what we want to do.”

The last few years of his career haven’t been entirely consumed by the celebration. Rice and Quinn regularly produce episodes for their true crime podcast, “The Dinner Party Show.” In 2023, the two helped solve a 1990 cold case murder in Los Angeles. And just this month, Rice was invited to interview actress Donna Mills for a feature in Vogue.

This week, though, his focus centers on Anne Rice and the local haunts she loved. One stop is Commander’s Palace — she once warned the staff about her mock jazz funeral across the street at Lafayette Cemetery, where she was famously carried in a coffin to a book signing at Garden District Book Shop, another destination on his list. He’s also visiting Vincent’s Italian Cuisine because “their corn and crabmeat bisque kept her going for years,” he said.

Rice’s own relationship with New Orleans is complex. He hasn’t lived here since 2001, when he permanently moved to Los Angeles.

His first 10 years were in San Francisco, until his parents told him they were spending a summer in New Orleans — except they had bought a house there and enrolled him in Trinity Episcopal School. Rice quickly realized it wasn’t a vacation; it was a relocation.

He called the move “an absolute cultural shock.” At his school in San Francisco, grades weren’t given at all to spare feelings, and students linked arms in protests around City Hall. A private school in Uptown felt worlds away.

“I don’t think (my mother) minded me connecting with a bigger set of points of view out in the world,” Rice said. “She was a lifelong Democrat and a liberal, but she wanted me not to assume that everybody around me felt the way that I did.”

For high school, he transferred to Isidore Newman School, where he still felt out of place as a closeted gay teenager and theatre kid at an athletics-obsessed institution. He channeled that anger into his first novel, “A Density of Souls,” a New York Times-bestseller written while his mother was in a diabetic coma. In time, though, he realized just how privileged he had been, he said.

He never planned to be a novelist. At Brown University, Rice expected to conquer the theatre department, but he never got a call back. That rejection fueled his love for prose. He had written screenplays, but avoided books — he didn’t want to invite comparisons to his mother. By the time he left Brown, his perspective had shifted. Writing novels was something he could control completely.

“Nobody could tell me not to do it,” Rice said. “They couldn’t stand in between me and the computer.”

His fear of comparison eventually dissolved. In 2017, he and his mother collaborated for the first time on their novel called “Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra” — a sequel to Anne Rice’s book “The Mummy, or Ramses of the Dead.”

The two spent 6 months working in the desert of Coachella Valley, where she was living at the time. During the writing sessions, Anne Rice would scrawl big notes on a sketchpad while her sister jogged their memories of the first book.

Collaboration with another writer can feel like a custody battle for the story. That wasn’t the case for Rice and his mother. She offered two gentle suggestions to him: more hats on characters, considering it was set in the Victorian era, and no true villains. Afterall, her vampire characters were mirrors of the human condition — conflicted, damned and isolated, despite their supernatural nature.

“I don’t really do villains,” she told him. “My whole thing, the world that I created, was about going into the point of view of the vampire and making you relate to them.”

During the pandemic, they began the third novel of the series. Meanwhile, Rice grew intrigued by romance fiction and the eBook revolution, when authors were defying the traditional expectations of publishers.

Mornings were for the Ramses novel; afternoons, when he would normally hit the gym, became time for a series of gay romance novels under the pseudonym C. Travis Rice — his “alter ego.” The “Sapphire Cove” series began light, then darkened, tackling addiction and suicide beneath the gloss of a posh Southern California beach resort.

Years prior, in 2013, he had written “The Heavens Rise” — his “attempt to write a less angry novel about New Orleans” than his debut. That resentment never returned.

Growing up, his mother interpreted the city for him — teaching him to admire the purple sunsets and hum of cicadas. Now he carried his own reverence. When storms approached, especially during Katrina, when the places he loved were washed away, he felt a fierce protectiveness.

As morning gave way to noon on Wednesday, his love for New Orleans became vivid. Over a second cup of black coffee, he recalled his mother’s legendary vampire balls every Halloween — he and his theatre friend singing show tunes till dawn in a cabaret room. His favorite were the Mardi Gras parties, when her Lower Garden District home became a revelry of king cake, flowing beer and plastic beads flung against windows and live oaks.

“We were very privileged. I got a great education,” Rice said. “I had fun in the French Quarter during the years when I used to have fun. I think there is a lot of angst and pain any young person goes through growing up. It’s better to do it in New Orleans, where there’s good food.”