SOURCE: “The Demon Seed,” in Washington Post Book World, October 10, 1993, pp. 4-5.

In the following review, Hand offers praise for Lasher.

Is there a madder, badder, braver bestselling writer than Anne Rice? Maybe so—but it's hard to imagine anyone else being able to pull off the literary legerdemain that Rice manages in her new novel. With Lasher she concocts heady and potent salmagundi of contemporary witchcraft, Caribbean voodoo, aristocratic decadence and good old-fashioned Celtic paganism, and makes what should be an unpalatable mess as wickedly irresistible as a Halloween stash of Baby Ruths.

At the heart of all this is the Mayfair clan, the impossibly wealthy New Orleans dynasty of witches first encountered in her 1990 The Witching Hour. For centuries the fate of the Mayfairs has been entwined with that of Lasher's eponymous anti-hero, an androgynous being of dubious spiritual provenance who has been haunting family...