Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

YA-- Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant California neurosurgeon who was taken from her mother at birth and raised by an aunt in California, does not know that there has been a powerful witch in her family in each generation for the past five centuries. She returns to the family's antebellum mansion in New Orleans after bringing back Michael Curry from the dead. He, too, has unwanted extrasensory gifts and is integrally tied to the Mayfair witches, having grown up in New Orleans. As Rowan and Michael's fates become intertwined, they seek to understand and destroy the terrible force that holds its power over the family. The ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel. While this 900+ page thriller tends to drag when Rice tells the story through the scholarly documents of the Talamasca, a group of scholars who have for centuries studied and chronicled happenings of the occult, her powerful imagery and detailed witchcraft history keep readers going. When she returns to the present, the novel surges to the end with morbid delights, sexually charged passages, and wicked tragedy. Several characters who are central to the story are not completely developed, and there is no genealogical chart to help sort out family members. These minor criticisms aside, this is a fascinating story with depth and detail. Rice's many fans will keep it circulating.

-Barbara A. Lynn, Topeka, KS

Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Well known for her vampire trilogy, Rice now turns to witches. Here she tells the story of the prominent and wealthy Mayfair family who, for five centuries, has cavorted with a supernatural entity that has brought them both great bounty as well as abject misery. Neurosurgeon Rowan Mayfair inherits the family fortune, along with the sinister attentions of this entity. When Rowan saves the life of Michael Curry their fates become entwined, and together they seek to understand and destroy the terrible force that holds her family in its power. Helping them in this dangerous task is occult investigator Aaron Lightner, introduced to readers in Rice's The Queen of the Damned ( LJ 10/1/88). Although a bit long-winded at times, this is still a compelling novel. The author's powerful writing and strong imagery keep the reader enthralled. Expect demand. BOMC main selection; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/90.--Ed. An interview with Rice appears in this issue in "Contributing Factors," p. 104.--Ed.

- Patricia Altner, Dept. of Defense Lib., Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.

Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.

Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches--a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.

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.