Anne Rice - Lasher
Oct
'07
Ah, I’ve said a lot about this one. I seemed to have expected a lot more from it when I started, thinking it was all very exciting drawing me in once again to the Mayfair witches’ lives. However, as always, I speed-read the last 100 pages or so. Anne Rice, you are an awesome writer, but your books go on for much too long.
I had a considerable amount of difficulty at the beginning, as I had to read several articles online (Wikipedia for the main part) about The Witching Hour. It’s been over a year since I read it, and it was my most recent Anne Rice book aside from this one. Thankfully, Rice is one of those authors who spends the first third of the book explaining what happened in previous books. Usually I hate this, because I read one book after the other, so I feel it’s wasted time telling me what I already know. I get it now though, and I won’t be so upset about it in the future.
What really pulled me in was Mona, and I was disappointed that she didn’t play a larger role. She added a lot of conflict and confusion, even some might say comic relief, but in the end she was just one of the Mayfair witches, another body filling up space at the house on First Street, waiting for life to pick her up and take her away. I thought for sure she would be the one Lasher intended to impregnant, that in his clumsiness of unintentionally murdering the other Mayfair witches he’d come to realize how powerful she was. I was positive he’d try to sneak in late at night for her.
Instead, there was a lot of talking about the past, a lot of talking about Rowan, who spent the last half of the book in a coma. I really loved reading Julien’s story as he told it to Michael in the attic, but Lasher’s seemed very unnecessary. Of course, that’s my folly. The book is called Lasher, not Julien. Of course Lasher’s story would be wiggled in there somewhere, and the end only makes sense. It just seemed too convenient for everyone, though, the way he volunteered himself for study after all the difficulty he had with Rowan’s desire to study him.
One could say he only gave up because he thought his daughter, Emaleth, was with the Talamasca. It was only mentioned in passing, however, and he didn’t try to flee when he found out they were astonished to hear of her existence. It was much too succinct, too evenly put together, too perfect.
I’ll read Taltos before I forget the storyline, but I’m afraid it’ll be just as uninteresting as Lasher’s own narrative.
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