Heavens Rise - Softcover

Rice, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349402841 ISBN 13: 9780349402840

Publisher: PIATKUS BOOKS, 2013

Synopsis

My name is Niquette Delongpre and on the night before my mother's forty-seventh birthday, my entire family vanished without a trace. Everyone assumed the swamp swallowed them. They were wrong ...Deep in the swamps outside of New Orleans, Niquette Delongpre and her family uncover a well on their property - a well that has roots all the way down into the soils of the Mississippi River. A well that brings ancient things to the surface - things that should have stayed buried. When Niquette is exposed to a small parasite, it triggers in her mysterious and dangerous powers. As she tries to come to grips with these new abilities and what they might mean for her future, she realises that she is not alone. Someone else, someone who was exposed to the same mysterious parasite during a clandestine visit to the swamp, is also discovering his new talents, and he's not as nice as she is ...

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Rice is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. The son of author Anne Rice and the late poet Stan Rice, he was raised in New Orleans. He now resides in Los Angeles, where he is a cohost of the Internet radio program The Dinner Party Show with Christopher Rice & Eric Shaw Quinn.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Heavens Rise 1

ATLANTA

MAY 2013

The patient in Room 4 was named Marshall Ferriot and he couldn’t dream.

Instead he experienced vivid eruptions of memory that came from the center of what he perceived to be his person. After the terrifying fall that landed him at death’s half-open door when he was only seventeen, he lost all sense of his physical body.

Only rarely was he given some sense of the passage of time and, when it came, it was always accompanied by the jarring realization that his home was a dark, purgatorial place where dreams and memories, all those aspects of human beings people consider to be intangible, took on discrete wavelengths before they were stripped from those human souls they once defined.

In these moments, he could feel himself dragging against a current of souls broken down to their raw constituents—a quantum flow of hopes, nightmares and memories—and it made him feel like shark bait being towed through open sea. While he had no sense of his limbs, he knew he was still too fully formed to be worn down and passed through this pulsing refinery of the spirit.

Then, a moment of stultifying blackness would arrive, stealing the passage of time, an intermittent distortion that turned a march of ten years in the conscious world into an endless tape loop of revelations lost, rediscovered and lost again.

Sometimes he could hear the nurses. Their whispers and their shouts would come in at equal volume and, with them, a dim awareness that they spoke of him often because they were afraid of him.

But, for the most part, Marshall Ferriot’s consciousness fluctuated steadily between vivid memories of the time before his fall and a terrifying awareness of his paralysis at the edge of death.

And the memories were growing stronger. They had come to include rich sensuous details that suggested an awakening of some kind might be close at hand. But first they carried him back to New Orleans, the city of his birth, and to the swamps of Tangipahoa Parish and a place called Elysium, where he’d been granted his first and last taste of a beautiful girl with cat-eyes and honey-colored hair, a girl whose very name filled the remnants of his soul with sustaining rage.

Niquette Delongpre.

Edition details

• Publisher: PIATKUS BOOKS
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0349402841
• ISBN 13: 9780349402840
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 321