The Witching Hour
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4.3 • 452 Ratings
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- $9.99
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
Engrossing and Thorough, a Dedicated Read
I was surprised to read some of the horrible ratings, while few, on this novel, which I honestly considered to be Rice’s greatest work to date. Such as The Stand and other epic novels, Rice seems to, despite its cast of too many characters, create from thin air an entire new world where the rules that we know don’t exist. But she explains these rules, further engrossing you into the narrative. I think that if you are familiar with Anne Rice’s descriptors in general and pick up such a dedicated, thick read about witches, you should maybe ask yourself why you even tried.
Amazing
Absolutely loved this book..the history of New Orleans was great.
The Witching Hour
Probably the best Anne Rice novel that I have read of hers. But after investing 1388 pages you would think she owed a more complete ending....Instead she gave us no real ending for an excuse; - to buy another book.