Lasher (Mayfair Witches Series #2) FROM THE PUBLISHER
From the day her first Vampire Chronicle was published, critics and readers - readers by the hundreds of thousands - have been mesmerized by the writings of Anne Rice. And with the publication of The Witching Hour, she created for us yet another world and legend, and both the chorus of praise (see back of jacket) and the multitudes of her readers once more increased. Now, in her new novel, Anne Rice brings us again - even more magically - into the midst of the dynasty of witches she introduced in The Witching Hour. At the center: the brilliant and beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, and Lasher, the darkly compelling demon whom she finds irresistible and from whose evil spell and vision she must now flee. She takes with her their terrifying and exquisite child, one of "a brood of children born knowing, able to stand and talk on the first day." Rowan's attempt to escape Lasher and his pursuit of her and their child are at the heart of this extraordinary saga. It is a novel that moves around the globe, backward and forward through time, and between the human and demonic worlds. Its many voices - of women, of men, of demons and angels, present and past - haunt and enchant us. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us through twilight paths, telling a chillingly hypnotic story of occult and spiritual aspirations and passion.
FROM THE CRITICS
BookList - Stuart Whitwell
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.
Kirkus Reviews
The sequel and conclusion to Rice's The Witching Hour (1990) shows Rice both at her best and at her hackiest. Volume One brought forth the Mayfair Witches, an incestuous family in New Orleans' steamy Garden District, headed by supersurgeon Rowan Mayfair, who is putting some of the family's seven-and-a-half billion into the Mayfair Medical Institute. At that novel's end, Rowan had given birth to an "entity" on the living-room rug that, assuming human shape, had nearly killed husband Michael in the swimming pool, then abducted Rowan. Now the evil being—which looks like Diorer's Christ and has been using witches in the Mayfair line to have itself reborn after dying time and again since the earliest days of the Reformation in Scotland—is skipping about Europe while trying to breed with Rowan and give birth to a female demon. But these porny pages don't arrive until we wade through 200 tediously undramatic sheets of dialogue filler quite lacking in storytelling oomph—though we are treated to teenygenius Mona Mayfair's seduction of the recovering Michael. All this is a case of background detail turning story into tapestry. Once Rice plunges us into Rowan's long rape, two miscarriages, and at last the birth of Emaleth, sister/wife for Rowan's demonic son Lasher, the novel lights up with rocket blast. How will Rowan escape her tyrant son, whose endless suckling and inseminating keeps her constantly orgasmic and horrified? But pigging out on Rowan's plight takes up only about 200 pages all told, and then more background filler—well, the novel's huge mythic underpinning—dims our spirits, although the story of Uncle Julien, as told by Julien's ghost to Michael,dances nicely. Too much Rice-A-Roni, but addicts will lick the pot.
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