Especially those who lived in the early to middle part of the twentieth century. Personally, I found the history of the Mayfairs to be fascinating, and I almost wish each of the legacy Mayfairs, or at least the more interesting ones, had gotten their own book. As the two become lovers, Rowan seems fated to return to the city of her birth, where she will finally confront the dark mysteries of the Mayfair clan and her own nebulous past once and for all.Īt nearly one thousand pages (in the Knopf hardback), it is a massive tome, and with a large part of it being essentially exposition, some readers are going to be put off by the saggy middle of the novel. Into Rowan’s life comes Michael Curry, an architect with his own ties to New Orleans who nearly drowns and is rescued by Rowan. Despite their best attempts to keep their distance, however, the Talamasca becomes fatefully intertwined with the family as one of their agents becomes sire of an important branch of the Mayfair clan.Īll of this is framed by the story of the present-day Mayfairs, particularly Rowan Mayfair, a young doctor who was whisked away from New Orleans as an infant and taken to California for initially unclear reasons, so she has never really known her family.

But what does Lasher ultimately want from the Mayfairs? That mystery is the heart of the novel’s plot, and it becomes clearer and clearer as the legend of the Mayfair witches unfolds, much of it told in epistolary form as collected by the Talamasca, a sort of early supernatural investigation team that watches and keeps tabs on the Mayfairs but tries not to directly interfere. The first book of Rice’s second epic series (and it is epic, covering around three hundred years of European and American history) follows the long line of the Mayfairs, a family of witches who trace their origins back to Renaissance-era Scotland and a witch named Deborah, the first to summon the dark spirit Lasher, who subsequently haunts and torments each of Deborah’s descendants in turn. So, is the story itself any good? We shall see. Yet sumptuous writing alone cannot sustain a story, especially one of this length. Whatever you think of her, one thing you can always count on Anne Rice for is sumptuous writing. Perhaps more than anything else she’s written in this particular setting, The Witching Hour perfectly captures the tone of the city itself, with its languid pace and its positively baroque level of detail. Her descriptions of the city are gem-like in their clarity and beauty, as is much of Rice’s writing here. Anne Rice-she of the famous Vampire Chronicles-had only recently returned to her beloved New Orleans when she began writing The Witching Hour, which is, among other things, a love letter to the Big Easy.

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