veronica's review
Lasher by Anne Rice
I hated this book. I gave it 3 stars in reverence of it being the sequel to "The Witching Hour" which I loved. I'm not generally a squeamish reader, but this one took it too far. The overwhelming and almost venerated abundance of incest and borderline pedophilia, the incredibly disturbing attitude toward rape, the lack of interest in coherence in plot... these all added up to a huge mess that I couldn't wait to put down. Rowan and Lasher explore their complicated relationship through a series of S&M-ish episodes; the only highlight of the book is the family history that is revealed through much of the book. The stories are genuinely interesting and the characters are at times even likable. It is interesting that the almost exclusive homosexuality in the Vampire Chronicles is replaced with an almost exclusive incest here. Oh, Anne Rice. I hear you are a devout Christian (perhaps a recent evolution). How did your brain ever create such terrible scenes?
