summer reading list
Let’s take a short break from life altering emotional trauma and discuss some of my summer reading, shall we?
The Lives of the Mayfair Witches (a series of three books) by Anne Rice
The first book, The Witching Hour, weighs in at just over 1,000 pages. Well worth the read, Rice’s story is inspired and intriguing. Whole generations of the mysterious Mayfair family are infused with multidimensional character here, while the family’s pet spirit, Lasher, lurks behind the scenes, doing both good and bad to further its dark aims. A perfect blend of gothic horror and epic storytelling.
Don’t bother with the sequels though. Lasher and Taltos take all the weakest parts of The Witching Hour and make them the main event. You also get the feeling that Rice kept changing her mind about where she wanted the plot to go, and was just too lazy to go back and rewrite earlier portions. Villians die far too soon and plot points that are critical in chapter one get batted away with an easy fix at book’s end. Personally, I think Rice would’ve been better off leaving Lasher in spirit form, instead of wasting her time telling the tale of his “race” in the sequels. Lasher is a weak follow up to the first book, but perhaps worth a read. Don’t even bother with Taltos.
For those of you keeping score, that’s 2,200 pages of Anne Rice this summer. Having read the first four Vampire books and the first three Mayfair novels, I can honestly say that the vampire series is better. It suffers none of the Mayfair series’s plot holes, but that’s beside the point. A lot of it has to do with Rice’s writing style. She writes gorgeous, sometimes spellbinding prose, but she’s incapable of writing convincing dialogue. The problem is that ALL of her characters speak with the same elevated tone of her narration. This isn’t really a problem in the vampire series, where the characters are two thousand years old on average. However, the dialogue feels stilted and artificial once it’s coming out of mere mortals. Mona Mayfair, the thirteen year old genius of the family, speaks with the exact same vocabulary and tone of seventy year old paranormal investigator Aaron Lightner, who speaks exactly like Michael Curry, a fifty year old architect from the wrong side of New Orleans, who speaks exactly like the narrator. It gets annoying after a while.
One thing is certain. I never need to hear another damned word about how beautiful New Orleans can be at sunset.
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