Word: lasher
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While Rice created a complex and believable interplay of voices in The Witching Hour, she fails to incorporate the same technique in Lasher. Her attempt at weaving together various narrative strands feels false and a bit too contrived. A great deal of Lasher reiterates the story lines which unfolded in The Witching Hour to the point that Rice seems desperate to make Lasher accessible to those unfamiliar with the earlier volume. The series of recollections of Lasher and other characters in the novel, juxtaposed with the voices of present-day Mayfairs, makes for a fairly disparate set of story lines...
...addition, the eroticism and sexuality which seem to come so easily in other Rice novels appears forced in Lasher. Thirteen-year-old Mona Mayfair, the heir to the Mayfair line should Rowan Mayfair die, displays a precocity beyond her years evident in her sexual encounters with Rowan's husband Michael. In a narrative account of a family based on incestuous relations, Mona's sexuality does not seem out of place. After all, the Mayfair line is founded on a series of bizarre couplings between relatives and between humans and spirits all in the name of the Mayfair family...
Both The Witching Hour and Lasher hinge on notions of procreation and lineage. Lasher draws its narrative force from the spirit Lasher's desire to reproduce. When Mona sleeps with Michael one wonders what sort of being will come of their union. But the erotic tension and consummation of desire between Mona and Michael has no bearing on the novel at all. Their erotic play is nothing more than sex for sex's sake, an act empty of any real schematic significance. The coupling of Michael and Mona represents a storyline which Rice fails to address later in the novel...
Rice does manage to garner the reader's sympathy for her characters. Evil spirits and people who should seem detestable are made glamorous and enchanting. Rice wields language in a powerful way, lulling her readers into an enchanted world in which evil spirits such as Lasher lose their ominous qualities. One feels part of a fairy tale unlike any other fairy tale one's heard. Though the novel is certainly melodramatic, Lasher is also quite subtly hypnotic...
...Rice ultimately takes on too much in Lasher--the novel is too broad in scope. Rice seeks to link up Celtic pagan myths to Christian ones, secular ideas to religious ones. Several of the disparate strands of the narrative seem intentionally left unresolved to pave the way for a sequel. Throughout the novel one is willing to forgive minor stylistic and narrative gaps, yet the eventual collapse of the historical panorama and Lasher's final confession seem little more than ridiculous. For devotes of the genre Rice offers all the elements which make the erotic/horror/fantasy tale popular--she just fails...