The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #1) by Anne Rice
On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and The Witching Hour begins.
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery--aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches--finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and--in passionate alliance--set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds--an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien--the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers--provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing. And always--through peril and escape, tension and release--there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.
I’m not sure how I feel about this book. While the premise was interesting, a family of “witches,” who may or may not be evil, Rice takes an exceedingly long time to tell the story. To paraphrase Mr. Spock, “verbose, isn’t she?” When it takes fifty pages to introduce one character, you know you’re in trouble.
Yet, I did enjoy reading it, sometimes, though it’s something of a slog. But I think it should have been two books: one for the Mayfair history, which is the part that’s the most interesting, and one for Rowan and Michael’s story. Either that, or have had a good editor go through the book with a machete.
Speaking of Rowan and Michael, it got old fast, having it explained over and over again as to how beautiful they are, how intelligent, how higher they are over us mere mortals. Yet, in the end, it didn’t seem to help them.
It finally got to be too much, especially since the conclusion was beginning to be pretty obvious when “the thirteen” was mentioned. Even worse was that three supposedly highly intelligent people, Rowan, Michael, and Aaron, don’t seem to be able to count that high.
And the idea that the story wouldn’t end with the end of the book, but continue on in two sequels, well, I couldn’t face that. It was time to end things.
Mount TBR 2023 Book Links
Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.
1. Alexander's Tomb: The Two-Thousand Year Obsession to Find the Lost Conquerer by Nicholas J. Saunders
2. Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune
3. Under the Empyrean Sky (Heartland Trilogy #1) by Chuck Wendig
4. Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon
5. After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War by Gregory P. Downs
6. The Wolf's Hour (Michael Gallatin #1) by Robert R. McCammon
7. Bag of Bones by Stephen King
8. Substitute by Susi Holliday
9. Fairy Tale by Stephen King
10. Huxley: From Devil's Disciple To Evolution's High Priest
11. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
12. The History of Bees (Climate Quartet #1) by Maja Lunde, Diane Oatley (Translator)
13. The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley
14. The Hunter from the Woods (Michael Gallatin #2) by Robert McCammon
15. The Far Arena by Richard Ben Sapir
16. The Humans by Matt Haig
17. Craven Manor by Darcy Coates
18. The Alpha Female Wolf: The Fierce Legacy of Yellowstone's 06 by Rick McIntyre
19. The Last Town (Wayward Pines #3) by Blake Crouch
20. Faerie Tale by Raymond E. Feist
21. The Magpie Lord (Charm of Magpies 1) by K.J. Charles
22. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated by Eric H. Cline
23. Wanderers (Wanderers #1) by Chuck Wendig
24. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
25. A Dog's History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans by Laura Hobgood-Oster
26. Bethany's Sin by Robert McCammon
27. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
28. The Tea Party by Charles L. Grant
29. Seeker (Alex Benedict #3) by Jack McDevitt
30. Jizzle by John Wyndham
31. The Taking by Dean Koontz
32. Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff
33. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
34. Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O'Farrell
35. Only the Beautiful by Susan Meissner
36. The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
37. A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species by Rob Dunn
38. Sparta: Rise of a Warrior Nation by Philip Matyszak
39. Wayward (Wanderers #2) by Chuck Wendig
40. The Summoning God (Anasazi Mysteries #2) by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, W. Michael Gear
41. The Power by Naomi Alderman
42. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
43. Day Zero (Sea of Rust #0) by C. Robert Cargill
44. Dog Days by Ericka Waller
45. Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
46. The Passage (The Passage #1) by Justin Cronin
47. Kallocain by Karin Boye, Gustaf Lannestock (Translator), Richard B. Vowles (Introduction)
48. The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) by M.R. Carey
49. Different Seasons by Stephen King
50. In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune
51. Lady in Waiting by Susan Meissner
52. Jackdaw (Jackdaw #1) by K.J. Charles
53. Blightborn (Heartland #2) by Chuck Wendig
54. The Harvest (Heartland #3) by Chuck Wendig
55. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
56. Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig
57. The Change by Kirsten Miller
58. The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
59. The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #1) by Anne Rice
Written by a woman
3. The Witching Hour by Anne Rice