Rice’s `Lasher’ wraps up Mayfair duo

LASHER, by Anne Rice, Knopf, 578 pages, $25.

Loyal Anne Rice fan though I am, I can only hope that with “Lasher” the Mayfair witch clan is out of her system.

“Lasher,” the sequel to “The Witching Hour,” is a far better read but suffers the sequel’s fate of being incomprehensible on its own. The problem with both these extremely long books is not boring plot lines or dull characters, but an absolute surfeit of good ones.

The premise of the series is that a huge, inbred clan of witches, the Mayfairs, is based in modern New Orleans. The clan was created and is watched over by a mercurial guardian spirit known to them as Lasher, who serves the most powerful witch of each generation. It becomes clear by the end of “The Witching Hour” that this spirit has its own agenda. Through a 200-year process of incestuous inbreeding, Lasher has genetically engineered a race of witches with amazing powers and too many chromosomes.

In “The Witching Hour,” Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant young surgeon from California, discovers that she is part of this strange family and heads to New Orleans to find her roots. In the process she saves, falls in love with and marries a psychic Irishman named Michael Curry; meets most of her new family (which numbers in the hundreds); learns the highly detailed history of the Mayfair witches — which stems back to the Scotland of Charles the First and is by far the best part of the book; becomes pregnant and has the fetus taken over by Lasher, who is born in record time, immediately grows to adult stature, almost kills Michael, and carries off Rowan to parts unknown.

Whew! If this all sounds like a long, scattered tale with an extremely unsatisfying ending, it is. Many of the individual characters and plot lines were fascinating, but there are just too many things going on.

“Lasher” is a better book in many ways but it, too, is hampered by an overly intricate story line and unwieldy cast. Most readers can care about only so many characters — my limit is five or six. Rice throws a dizzying array across the page, sketching out their personalities, then whipping them away to make place for someone else. After a few chapters, it’s difficult to maintain sympathy or interest in any of them, especially as even the best lacks consistency.

Rowan Mayfair, ostensibly the main character, is said to be a brilliant, take-charge kind of woman, yet what we are shown is a person making one poor judgment after another. Michael Curry was invested with psychokinetic powers in the first book but these are scarcely mentioned in the second. When his beloved Rowan is carried off by a demon, Michael sits tight at home, hoping she’ll call if she gets a chance. A new character, Mona Mayfair (surely one of the least believable 13-year-olds ever to grace the printed page), is supposedly powerful enough to be designated the next great Mayfair witch. Do we see her use these powers to move the action along? Hardly at all. Finally, Lasher himself, whose sinister presence gave such brooding zest to the first book, becomes in flesh a maudlin whiner.

But I read both books, didn’t I? Cover to cover.

So will you, too, probably, in spite of my carping. Why? Because it’s Anne Rice and even at her weakest she’s still one of the most wonderfully unique writers around. Her books have redefined the popular concept of vampires, spawned fashion trends, inspired rock songs, and pushed homoeroticism out of the shadows into the mainstream of public consciousness. That’s precisely what saddens many longtime readers; we know how wickedly good she can be and we want our next fix.

Oh, I can already hear some of you gnashing your teeth and crying, “Blasphemer!” Before you show up with the stakes and firewood, I suggest you read “Interview With the Vampire” again, or her recent “Tale of the Body Thief.” Even better, hunt down copies of her lesser known early novels, such as “Cry to Heaven,” one of the most gorgeously bizarre and perversely sensual books ever written. These will embody the taut darkness for which the Mayfair witch books strive but sadly miss.

Lynn Flewelling is a free-lance writer who lives in Bangor.