The Witching Hour
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- 59,00 kr
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved author of the Vampire Chronicles, the first installation of her spellbinding Mayfair Chronicles—the inspiration for the hit television series!
“Extraordinary . . . Anne Rice offers more than just a story; she creates myth.”—The Washington Post Book World
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, an intricate tale of evil unfolds.
Moving through time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the Louis XIV’s France, and 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, The Witching Hour is a luminous, deeply enchanting novel.
The magic of the Mayfairs continues:
THE WITCHING HOUR • LASHER • TALTOS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
``We watch and we are always here'' is the motto of the Talamasca, a saintly group with extrasensory powers which has for centuries chronicled the lives of the Mayfairs--a dynasty of witches that brought down a shower of flames in 17th-century Scotland, fled to the plantations of Haiti and on to the New World, where they settled in the haunted city of New Orleans. Rice ( The Queen of the Damned ) plumbs a rich vein of witchcraft lore, conjuring in her overheated, florid prose the decayed antebellum mansion where incest rules, dolls are made of human bone and hair, and violent storms sweep the skies each time a witch dies and the power passes on. Newly annointed is Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant California neurosurgeon kept in ignorance of her heritage by her adoptive parents. She returns to the fold after bringing back Michael Curry from the dead; he, too, has unwanted extrasensory gifts and, like Rowan and the 12 Mayfairs before her, has beheld Lasher: devil, seducer, spirit. Now Lasher wants to come through to this world forever and Rowan is the Mayfair who can open the door. This massive tome repeatedly slows, then speeds when Rice casts off the Talamasca's pretentious, scholarly tones and goes for the jugular with morbid delights, sexually charged passages and wicked, wild tragedy. 300,000 first printing; BOMC main selection.
Customer Reviews
"The Witching Hour" weaves together themes of authority, history, and morality
Using the supernatural as a backdrop, Anne Rice's epic novel "The Witching Hour" weaves together themes of authority, history, and morality.
The novel centers around the Mayfair family, a powerful dynasty of witches who possess unique and dangerous abilities. The story is told from multiple perspectives, including those of the Mayfair witches, a group of spirits who have haunted the Mayfair family for generations, and an outsider named Aaron Lightner, who becomes entangled in the Mayfair's dark legacy.
At the heart of the novel is Rowan Mayfair, a young woman, a neurosurgeon, who possesses powerful psychic abilities that allow her to see and communicate with ghosts, control people's actions, and even kill with her mind.
I found Rowan Mayfair as a really complex and disturbing character. Throughout the novel, Rowan struggles with the weight of her family's history and the expectations placed upon her as a Mayfair witch. The Mayfair family has a history of incestuous relationships, murder, and manipulation, and Rowan must grapple with the weight of this legacy as she navigates her own powers and relationships. Despite her disturbing qualities, Rowan undergoes significant personal growth and evolution throughout the story, making her a compelling and nuanced character.
While "The Witching Hour" can be a very disturbing book at times, I think it is ultimately a captivating and thought-provoking work that explores the darker corners of the human psyche and the supernatural world.
"The Witching Hour" is a must-read for fans of Gothic fiction, supernatural thrillers, and complex character studies. Anne Rice's writing is lush, evocative, and immersive, and she masterfully weaves together themes of power, history, and morality.