Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour ended with Lasher finally breaking through to the mortal world. In a dramatic climax, he hijacks Rowan and Michael’s baby’s body, kidnaps Rowan, and leaves Michael for dead. Now in Lasher, the Mayfair family is in disarray. No one can find Rowan. Many of them are sure that Lasher isn’t real. Michael is alive but in a fog. Then the Mayfair women start to mysteriously die. And they’re all dying in the same gruesome way, massive uterine hemorrhaging. Finally, even those who don’t believe in Lasher recognize that something is going on. The family throws all their efforts into finding Rowan and stopping Lasher, but are even their vast resources enough to stop him?
[Warning: My review of Lasher contains some spoilers!]
A new Mayfair witch rises after Rowan disappears
Lasher picks up a couple of months after the conclusion of The Witching Hour. Michael is alive, but he’s a ghost of himself. His memories of Christmas are foggy, and he isn’t sure if Rowan was taken by Lasher or left of her own free will. The thought that Rowan may have chosen to leave him is slowly killing him. The medicines the doctors have him on aren’t helping him think, either.
Then Mona comes in. A woman trapped in a child’s body (not literally), Mona is smart and fearless. She swoops in, seduces Michael, and frees him from his stupor (mostly, he still stumbles around a bit lost for a while). Now, considering she’s only thirteen, it’s kind of gross how many times they have sex. Sure, it’s par for the course with the Mayfairs, but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.
Still, Mona’s strength and brains are exactly what the family needs. She is able to get the whole family mobilized to protect the rest of the Mayfair women from the mysterious deaths that are suddenly striking them down. She pieces together what is actually happening, how to keep everyone safe, and even how to find Rowan. She becomes the leader that the Mayfairs need to move forward.
Lasher is more about the past than the present
Even with everything that happens with Mona and the Mayfair women, Lasher is more about the past than anything, once Julien makes an appearance as a ghost to Michael and recounts his whole life story. In The Witching Hour, it looked like Julien was Lasher’s biggest ally in the Mayfair family. He was the only male that Lasher had ever bothered with. He had no conscience and ran around impregnating every Mayfair girl he could, especially those in the direct bloodline of the legacy. His own daughters were complete fair game for him, as were little children.
In Lasher, we get the story from Julien’s point of view. None of the facts change, he admits to all the horrible things he did. But he insists that he did them to try and defeat Lasher, not help him. He tries to justify everything, even claiming that he didn’t want to do some of the things he did, but he was “forced” into them. Honestly, it sounded to me like when an abuser blames the victim, “I don’t want to hit you, you just make me so mad.” It was just his excuse.
In addition to Julien’s past, we get Lasher’s backstory. Turns out he’s not some eternal spirit that came into being when Suzanne called his name. He’s not exactly human, either. He was a creature born of two special bloodlines that was more than human. He lived out a moral life wanting only to help others, but it ended poorly in blood and death.
When Suzanne called him back into being, he didn’t remember what he’d been before, but he knew he wanted to be mortal again. And once he had that, he wanted to create more beings like him. Beings to take over the world. Of course, he never shared that part of his desire with his witches. They thought he would just join them as a flesh and blood consort.
Once his past is revealed to Michael and the Talamasca they have very differing views on what should happen next. But when Julien shared his past with Michael, he also shared a prophecy and issued an order to him. Michael will do whatever it takes to fulfill the prophecy and finish his job. No matter what it costs him or who stands in his way.
Book Review: The Witching Hour (Lives of Mayfair Witches 1) by Anne Rice
A rather disturbing book
I first read Anne Rice when I was still a child. No, it was not really appropriate reading for a ten-year-old, but I was a strong reader and precocious, so I read it. I loved the books back then, so much magic and mystery, adventure and danger. Reading them now, I’m more struck by how disturbing they are.
The sexual abuse and depravity that runs rampant in the Mayfair family is gross. The average age for a girl to have a baby seems to be thirteen. New Orleans may be in the deep South, but that’s still stereotypical and disturbing. Mona brags about losing her virginity at eight. Eight!
And then there’s the incest. Among the further branches of the family, there is more of an attempt to marry further out. They still all marry Mayfairs, but they try to avoid close branches of the family tree. Not so for the legacy line. That line is so intertwined that I wouldn’t be surprised if they started popping out clones. Yes, I know that’s not technically possible, but with so much interbreeding, there can’t be much genetic diversity left in the line.
Then there’s the obvious mental health issues in the family. And the plain old mental and physical abuse. Locking people in rooms, medicating them into drug-induced comas, flat-out killing people to stop them from leaving. The Mayfairs are the definition of a toxic family.
I think part of Anne Rice’s success comes from the fact that her writing was so scandalous for its time. Now we have heard so many outrageous and gruesome stories that the shock value has worn off. Instead of feeling groundbreaking and different, it just feels dirty and wrong to read.
Honestly, the story would have greatly improved if Mona had been five to ten years older and not a literal child. And if Michael had stood up to Mona instead of sleeping with her, he would have been a worthy hero instead of just another Mayfair sleeping around and killing his enemies.
Anne Rice’s Lasher isn’t as great as I remembered
In other words, Anne Rice made it big because she was the first to really try and make smut into literature, that succeeded. But her writing is only really okay, not great. She often gets too wordy, and her descriptions can drag on. I think the sensationalism of her stories carried them much farther than the actual value of them.
My Rating: 6/10
I know plenty of people will disagree with me, but I bet if they approached the books as if they had never heard of Anne Rice and without expectations, they would come away feeling very different about them. That’s what I did for this reading of Lasher and I just came away feeling queasy.
Mayfair Witches Returns for All Out War in Season 2 on AMC!
