Lasher (Mayfair Witches Series #2) » (Reprint)

Best known for The Vampire Chronicles, a series of dark, hypnotic novels steeped in Gothic horror, Anne Rice now applies her vivid storytelling skills to Christian fiction, most notably an acclaimed series based on the life of Christ.

"SEDUCTIVE MAGIC...SPELLBINDING...Rice stages her scenes in a wide variety of times and locales, tapping deeply into the richest veins of mythology and history."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"STEAMY...FAST-PACED AND HUGELY ENGROSSING...Rice's title character—a seductive, evil, highly sexual and ultimately tragic creature—is fascinating."
—The Miami Herald
"BEHIND ALL THE VELVET DRAPES AND GOSSAMER WINDING SHEETS, THIS IS AN OLD-FASHIONED FAMILY SAGA....Rice's descriptive writing is so opulent it almost begs to be read by candlelight."
—The Washington Post Book World
"RICE SEES THINGS ON A GRAND SCALE...There is a wide-screen historical sweep to the tale as it moves from one generation of witches to the other."
—The Boston Globe
"EROTIC...EERIE...HORRIFYING...A tight tale of the occult in present-day New Orleans...Anne Rice is a spellbinding novelist.... LASHER quenches."
—Denver Post A MAIN SELECTION OF THE LITERARY GUILD(c)

BookList

So stunningly bad is the first third of this book that only the lunatic and the true devotee are likely to get beyond it. It is actually a riot of Rice's worst sins: strained and wooden characterizations, the abandonment of plot for the sake of a tangled and murky history, and a sort of mutant prose stumbling between a modern person's idea of old-fashioned elegance and an old-fashioned person's idea of how people actually talk in the 1990s. Part of the purpose of this 200-page cancer is to make the transition from the novel's progenitor, The Witching Hour (1990), but this could have been accomplished in 10 or 15 pages. Well, let's say you made it through. What you get now is the best of Rice: a deliciously perverse image of an infant, Lasher, who grows to sexual maturity within days of his birth and immediately starts copulating with his mother even while she swoons with the pleasure of his suckling. Of course, it's always nice to read about sex, and Rice's romantic imagination doesn't let her down: Lasher is dark, handsome, sadistic, childlike, and tender. His mother cannot resist him even after she has twice miscarried in the space of three months. But Rice cannot quite bring home the promising story of Lasher's desire to repopulate the earth with his own kind, and the story limps to an unsatisfying conclusion. By the end, then, we've had a bit of everything: the good, the bad, and the truly ugly. Indeed, without her reputation, Rice would never have found a publisher for this wretched mess.