Every day, after staring blankly at the ground in front of the nearest bus stop to my house for over half an hour, and having smoked one fifth of my pack of Camels, my impatience regarding the ridiculous unreliability of public transport reaches new-fangled heights.

Considering it's a one and a half hour bus ride to get to my destination, a university in the center of the city, I can do one of two things: sit on the loud, foul smelling bus, dwelling in my tedious exasperation which will proliferate if my walkman suddenly decides to stir up a migraine; or sit back and relax with my newly picked up Anne Rice novel, Lasher.

Now I can't say that I couldn't put it down, or that it kept me perpetually engrossed. I haven't been immersed in a novel since I was fifteen. I think my patience has just run thin in recent years; but it was certainly a very entertaining read for the duration of my bus rides.

A tragic creature on a journey to achieve self-righteousness while at the same time, one of the most perplexing characters I've ever seen takes control of this book and builds a magnificent contrast that parallels with the rest of the cast. This book bubbles with witchcraft, incest and insanity, some of the finer themes worth reading about.

Anne Rice's romantic writing, unfortunately, is sometimes a bit too romantic and pseudo-passionate making it a tad monotonous; her scenery is constantly beautiful and she lacks when describing more unpleasant situations. On top of that, Rice alludes to a lot of conventional literary works like Shakespeare or Dickens, which makes her writing a little shallow.