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LITERATURE  

Works by Rick Alan Rice

In some respects, this site is a direct result of a nasty event that took place in February 2005. My family was awakened one Friday morning by the sound of a smoke alarm and the sight of an orange glow that should never be seen within walls. We mercifully escaped harm, but within minutes most everything we had ever owned was gone. That included a considerable amount of my 30-plus years of creative writing. 

This site is both a naked exercise in self publishing, and a mechanism for securing my recovered oeuvre. I have learned in a direct way that what you put out does come back to you. Most of the stuff on this page is still available because it has been floating around the universe of family, friends, publishers and agents for years, and as pieces are reassembled, and as new material is developed, this page and the links on this page are updated.  

 Included with the synopses below are links you can click to read excerpts from the listed works.

NOVELS

• Landscape Architecture -- Read Excerpt

Adult Contemporary - current project

Following the suicide of his son, a seminal author of "the California school of design" contemplates the end of his own life, and the legacy of his struggling firm. I have spent enough years with environmental design firms that judgments in architecture have started to feel personal to me, as if this stuff matters. It is a personal chaos we create. We live in bubbles of alternative reality, designing as we go, planting more of what we've got. Sometimes it is good. We make public spaces.  We contribute to conducive public interactions. Then other times it is individual vanity and greed, or just mimicry of some current idea. We let fields grow wild and don't do enough. We encroach upon neighbors and issue guidelines. We restore and honor. We lose our way and stay lost for years. Conscious or not, we are creating a landscape architecture... This is a wistful, sometimes funny, romantic end piece. While working on it I have often thought what a great final movie it would make for Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. In fact, I've worked a bit on the screenplay.

• Up On the Blue (working title)

Fact-Based Adult Contemporary - current project

Epic family drama played out on Nebraska homesteads of the late 1800s and into the 20th Century. This is the book I was focused on at the time of our 2005 fire -- the one based on the homestead diaries of my paternal great-grandfather and interviews with my paternal grandfather. This is a romance. Almost all of the work done to date on this project was lost, but rebuilding it is one of my highest priorities. This book and Landscape Architecture mark departures for me in that both are attempts at that most futile of all pursuits: literary fiction.

• Handy Man -- Read Excerpt

Adult Contemporary - 350 pages

A group of marginally employed tradesmen carries out escalating acts of aggression against corporate leaders. I put this project on hold in 2001 after the World Trade Center attacks took place, because the atmosphere seemed a little raw, though the tone of this book is more comedy than drama. I wrote it thinking about a period when I was around a lot of handy men, and it occurred to me that some of them were pretty under employed. Never a good idea to under engage active, disgruntled minds. My Jihadists are red-blooded American public policy wonks pissed at the real devils in our society -- the consultants!

• Cowboy Town -- Read Excerpt

Adult Contemporary - 450 pages

Ex-con seeks redemption and the start of a new life through a love affair carried out on a struggling Colorado cattle ranch. This was always a love letter to my wife Joanne. It was intended to have the feel of the Classic Movie Channel black & white films she loves so well. It is in that popular noir vein of Eisenhower-era cattle ranching stories. It owes a lot to Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass By and the movie that was made from that work, "Hud," a personal favorite. I feel a strong connection to all of the people in this book because I know these guys. It's tough being any thing but a tough guy in a cowboy town. Their behavior does have an undeniable effect on women. Maybe that's why things get so hot there under the dust and sun. I wrote virtually the entire thing by hand while sitting in a cubicle in the Vallejo, California Public Library. Couldn't go home, the Mrs. was upset. This manuscript survives in hard copy.

• Kansas Trilogy

The life cycle of a Kansas community from its homesteading roots in the 1870s through its development as a resort community and its eventual decline. The stories are based on stories I heard about the community my family moved into in 1965. Population never larger than 2,000, it was the historical home base for my mother's divorce-fractured family. All seven of the siblings had lived there at one time or another, though seldom at the same time, and they knew the characters within the community -- and what characters there were! The place was rich with public eccentrics. The town had a conveyed history, a charmed quality,  and it had its local legends. The rest took seed in my mind while I was a teenager there, and I lived in those odd places, put it on paper and embellished it to seem comical and dangerous and doomed -- scary sometimes, in a sad way. These wonderfully odd, vulnerable people are all we, really. They pin their hopes on faith and slim promise. They suffer highs and crushing sorrow. They drown in their first overwhelming love and lose their innocence. They give into their worst instincts and falter and sometimes rebound. Then they just keep living.

• (Untitled)

Fantasy - in progress

A pioneering community's desperate prayers are answered, but not by the entity intended. Eerie happenings in a nascent 19th century Kansas community. This is the foundation of the three Kansas books. If there were such a category as historical satire, this would be that. It is a frontal attack on religiosity.

• Marion Hotel -- Read Excerpt

Adult Contemporary - 350 pages

Two aging hotel residents struggle against their separate demons of alcohol and mental illness. This is another personal story inspired by the characters in the small Kansas farm town where I went to high school. All of the three Kansas books share a werewolf and a fantasy horror element. In the Marion Hotel, it is mental illness. In the first book it is religious delirium. In the third it is decay. Much of this book survived the fire as a singed manuscript, and it will be resurrected.

• City By the Lake -- Read Excerpt

Adult Contemporary - 450 pages

A family attempts to survive in a declining Kansas farm community buffeted by change, supernatural forces, and murder. Part William Inge drama, part horror-fantasy, I think of this as my boyhood book, because it is populated with the images of my adolescent years. I started writing it in college and to me it will always be the best I've done. It is random and episodic and to date utterly un-publishable. Reading this recalls for me how I thought at a certain charmed, naive time in my life. Most of this manuscript survived the fire in hard copy and it will be resurrected. It wouldn't open any doors, but would make a great third novel.

• Cork

Adult Contemporary - 250 pages

I love this idea, though it isn't incredibly original. Certainly it was influenced by the Herbert Lieberman novel "Crawl Space," which I was introduced to through a 1971 TV-movie adaptation. In the 1980s there was an awful Klaus Kinski movie called "Crawl Space" that had nothing to do with the Lieberman story beyond having a weirdo in (or under) the house. My story is about a disturbed young man named Jimmy Cork who escapes the Vacaville mental corrections facility, where he has been sentenced for the homicide of his mother and her boyfriend. The fugitive Cork crawls under the home of a young Marin County couple and takes up refuge within the walls of the house. Things go terribly wrong for Jimmy, and for the host couple, from that point on. I wrote this around 1987, when my wife and I first moved to Marin County just after we were married. Interesting story, poor writing effort. It was lost in our house fire and may not be resurrected. The screenplay, on the other hand...

• Wind On the Water

Eco-Thriller - 250 pages (not available)

A real amateur effort about a Greenpeace-type group that works to undermine an international whaling company. Around 1978 I took this manuscript to a Boulder, Colorado lawyer who was presenting himself as a literary agent on the side. He read it and thought he could sell it, which I found suspicious and a little nauseating. Was it that easy to sell crap? Naively, foolishly, I decided then and there to pull it back and never go the route of success ever again. A starving artist, that's what I'd be! That's right -- a nut. The one copy of this manuscript was lost to fire and the book will not be available.

SCREENPLAYS

• Cork

Screenplay: Adult Contemporary Thriller - 90 minutes

Screenplay version of my novel "Cork," about a murderer who escapes from a mental corrections facility and takes refuge within the walls of a young couple's home. The screenplay is considerably better than the novel. Odd settings and visual set pieces make it a potentially avante garde visual work.

• The Oracle

Screenplay: Political Satire - 120 minutes

Charlie meets Being There meets Wag the Dog. A junior White House policy advisor gains special insight for an administration in desperate need.

NON-FICTION

• Total Loss -- Read Excerpt

Non-Fiction:  - abandoned work

I started this work to capture my impressions of what it is to experience a total loss fire, and to share our experience of the aftermath. That was to include our interactions with our insurance company. The link below provides an account of the fire event, but the work didn't go far beyond that. Part of the reason was that my wife and I were overwhelmed with insurance-related work, trying to prove and evaluate our losses. I fully expected to have a cautionary tale to tell, and some good advice for the next disaster victim who goes up against his insurer. It was tough dealing with claims adjusters and their sometimes-threatening minion, but in the end our insurer did well by us, much to my surprise. And in doing so, they stole my book! Still, if you wonder what it feels like to be awakened at dawn to the sound of a smoke alarm, here it is. This book was to be captured in this unctuous line repeated by our insurance agent and his doleful secretary whenever we would call their office after the fire, asking for help they were not prepared to render: "Go home -- and be with your family."

• The God Force - And How To Use It

Non-Fiction:  - 200 pages (not available)

This was a book that I co-authored in the late 1970s with a sociology professor at the University of Colorado. He used it in a class he taught called something like "Magic, Mysticism and Power." Our effort provided a cursory overview of the spiritual/human potential movements of the time, and offered exercises designed to demonstrate and entice the extraordinary human living within us all. We signed a publishing contract with a small Seattle publisher who went out of business or returned to his home planet just after the deal was inked. Mercifully my only copy of this book was lost in our house fire. This will not be available.

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