The Witching Hour

I have mixed feelings about this series as a whole. The first book was very solid, especially with the file the Talamasca had on the Mayfairs, it made for a well-rounded story, and remains one of my favorite of Anne Rice's novels. The ending absolutely leaves one in suspense and eager to read the next book to see what happens.

Unfortunately, Lasher turns out to be a huge rape-feat. He ties up Rowan and rapes her repeatedly, desperate to start a new race of Taltos, heedless of the effect that this has on her health. Aside from learning more about the Mayfair Witches and Lasher through backstory narratives, this book didn't add much to the world of the Mayfair Witches.

Taltos was a little better, and we learn some substantial information show more about the Taltos, but the first book in this series remains the strongest one. The whole series could have been so much better had Ms. Rice went into different directions with several of the plot points of Lasher/Taltos. show less

There’s a house in New Orleans, in the Garden district that has slowly fallen into disrepair. It’s the residence of the core of the Mayfair family – the Mayfair witches

For generations the Talamasca has watched the Mayfair witches since their distant ancestor was burned at the stake in Scotland. Her descendants since then have passed on her dangerous legacy – a magical gift and the Lasher. A spirit of ever increasing power and dangerous, unknown motives – a creature that definitely has blood on its hands even as it put gold in the Mayfair pockets

And now, reaching the 13th generation of Mayfair witches, all that knowledge over the centuries may finally be needed to reveal the Lasher’s eventual plan.

Some books are long

Some show more books are very long

Some books are very very long indeed

Some books are “ye gods WHYYY?!” long

And then there’s Witching Hour which is much much longer than that.

It’s not just the length of the book – and it is a mammoth 1,200 pages – it’s how long the book feels as well. Some books can be really wrong and you still dive through them because they’re awesome – they feel short. And some short books drag on because they feel long with dense, awful writing and lack of any real pacing. Well, this was an incredibly long book THAT FELT EVEN LONGER!

The writing is so dense and so boring and so repetitive that it is an achievement to get through. It has to be said about Anne Rice that she is good at establishing time and place with evocative description – and she certainly does that in this book. But she doesn’t do it once – every place needs this description dozens of times, over and over the same points, the same places, the same times are described again and again in really long winded terms. Any evocative sense of setting is lost in the sheer overwhelming wave of unnecessary verbiage.

There’s a lot of grossly unnecessary detail. I struggled to start this book because we were treated to such a long winded, unnecessary analysis of Michael’s life before we were ever given any reason to connect to this man that I nearly gave up right there. I have no idea why we need the best part of 100 pages to describe Michael’s past or what it added to the book. But the same thing happens several times – Petyr can’t just be an agent of the Talamasca, we need to know his life story first. Some random agent in the 20s couldn’t just be a Talamasca agent, no, we needed to know his childhood, his history, how he joined the Talamasca, who he worked with… so much information for so little purpose. We can’t just get the story of Rita Mae, childhood friend of Deidre – no, we need to include far too many details about Rita Mae as well and I have absolutely no idea why I should care, why this is relevant or why I am having to read this.

To make it worse, the repetitiveness comes in as well. Rita Mae tells her story, then we have it repeated in Aaron’s narrative. A doctor tells his story about Deidre – which doesn’t really add anything unique – and then that gets repeated by Aaron. A priest tells his story, a nun tells her story – and then all these stories get repeated again. And these stories themselves are an exercise in redundancy. To show us how meticulous and creepy the Talastalkers are, we get the same information from several different sources to really drive home just how assiduously the Talastalkers have left no stone unturned in their quest to be the creepiest of creepers. So, yet MORE repetition!

And let’s have a swipe at the Talamasca here – because I’m still somewhat at a loss as to what exactly they’re doing? Trying to stop the Lasher? Well you’ve had 3 centuries of doing absolutely nothing towards that goal. The mere thought of the Lasher makes them cower in their beds. Ok, is it to help the family? Well you had evidence of generations of incest and multiple murders and didn’t feel the need to intervene. So is it just curiosity? Because that seems like a really dubious justification for centuries of riffling through someone’s rubbish and stealing their medical records. It’s not that curiosity isn’t a real motive – it is a very reasonable motive. But if that is the motive then the Talamasca are severely creepy, entitled and unethical people who feel they can intrude on someone’s life to this degree for the sake of their own nosiness. Hence my reference to Talastalkers.

Read More show less

It's been ages, and I read a lot of Anne Rice, but in the beginning, there's a scene with a person in a wheelchair who looks to be barely alive...then we get into the invalid's mind and find that, oh my! Things are not at all as they seem. Brilliant. Memorable. Sucks you in and makes you squirm wondering what will happen next.

Rowan Mayfair is a neurosurgeon in California. Michael Curry renovates old houses in the San Francisco area. After a near-drowning, Michael acquires an odd power to "see" things and their histories when he touches them with his hands. Michael and Rowan are destined to cross paths, and inevitably they do. Having both been born in New Orleans, they find their way back there, together, when Rowan's birth mother dies and she discovers she descends from a long line of "witches". But was it really fate that brought Rowan and Michael together?

This was a re-read for me, and was a totally different experience the second time around. I remember reading The Witching Hour many years ago somewhat by accident, when the cassette tape audiobook version show more was in the company car that I was driving. I had never experienced a book on audio before, so I stuck the tape in and was subsequently entranced for the next few days during my commutes to/from work. I literally fell under this book's spell and have had an obsession with audiobooks since then. I also greedily consumed the next two books in the series, though didn't enjoy those quite as much. At any rate, when I heard that there was to be a series adaptation based on The Witching Hour, I decided to revisit the book. I wanted to repeat the audio experience, so borrowed a copy via the Libby app (be prepared for 50 hours if you're listening), but it wasn't the experience I remember at all. My best guess is that I previously read an abridged version, with a different narrator. This time around, the book really dragged for me, and that magical component just wasn't there. Anne Rice was great at researching history and creating a story with loads of historical context. However, I found that the excessive detail and repetition bogged down the story, and by the time the climax came at the end of the book, it was rushed and too fantastical to be credible. It was hard for me to come to terms with this re-read, as I found it so much more disappointing compared to my initial read those many years ago. And if that weren't disappointing enough, don't even think about watching Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches series on AMC. It's one of the worst adaptations I've seen of any book. The story is completely different and the casting is all wrong. Just don't do it. show less

I absolutely loved almost everything about this, except for the ending. Of course, the ending is not really an ending, this is only the first part of a trilogy after all, but I found it deeply unsatisfying anyway, and it is keeping me a bit from continuing in number two. That, and number two not starting out very well with a disgusting young brad seducing the honorable male lead.
The parts that I loved were exquisite world-building (sounds funny, given that this takes place in an existing world, so maybe the building part is not really accurate, but in any case, the descriptions are done really well), very nice characters and a highly immersive storyline. I can imagine a lot of people would have problems with the copious amounts of show more incest and other types of sex, but for some reason, this didn't really bother me. There was one thing that bugged me: the main character at some point refers to rough sex as rape, even though it was completely consensual. She doesn't say this to anyone else, it was either in her own thoughts, or mentioned to him during the sex, but even so, I thought this was ridiculous. By definition, I'd say you cannot ask someone to rape you. show less

It took me two months, but I finally finished this behemoth. This was my first ever Anne Rice book, so of course I choose one that was 1,038 pages. To be fair, this and the two-sequels, were hand-me-downs, so I didn't have much choice in where to start. But where to start with this review? Wellll,let me start with the plot... or the plot structure. The characters, setting, and story are gradually introduced over the first third of the story, and a lot of it is filled with mood-setting scenes, or background characters filling in information, which feels a lot like gossip. Then as the main characters learn more about the family central to this book, the Mayfair family, we read along with one of the characters as he is given a history of show more this family by a mysterious group that has been watching the Mayfair Witches for centuries, The Talamasca. The middle third of the book is taken up by this history, where we learn about each generation of them, and how inbred they are, with fathers frequently fathering children with their daughters or even granddaughters. Its very disturbing and unpleasant. But also interesting. Why would they do these things? There's some level of intrigue here. Then after the history lesson is complete and the characters become up to date on what is happening now with the present generation, the actual plot of the book kicks in, nearly 2/3 of the way through. But there still seems to be no drive to this plot. It still meanders until the climax occurs near the very end of the book. At this point, the main characters who have been established over the course of 850-900 pages behave in very uncharacteristic ways. The main descendent of the Mayfair family, Rowan, doesn't put up much of a battle against the demon, spirit, mass of small cells - thing that has been manipulating this family for generations. She knows how bad this thing is, but still caves almost immediately to it in the most disgusting of ways. There were some very offensive parts about her seeming to want to be raped by this thing and enjoying it, but also hating it at the same time. She had developed a relationship with the other main character Michael, who is an innocent, super hot architect, who also knows all about this creature, Lasher, and has decided that Lasher must be stopped. Rowan believes Michael is her one true love, her soulmate, and loves him completely, but after they are married, and Rowan is pregnant with their child, she betrays Michael by accepting Lasher and gives up on the fight and uses their unborn baby's body to bring a physical version of Lasher into the world. It was nonsensical, and unbelievable based on the character that was built up the entire novel. That being said, Lasher does seem like an interesting villain and I am slightly curious to see how they could eventually defeat him. Does that mean I'll continue this series? I still haven't decided, but if its anything like this info-dump of a book, I'll have to set aside a large chunk of time to finish it. show less

Anne Rice's prodigious and melodramatic Gothic saga "The Witching Hour" introduces the ancient clan of Mayfair witches, and the diabolic umbra Lasher who twists and torments the Mayfairs across centuries and continents in his unholy quest to become flesh. While the book has at least its fair share of conventional "spooky" ingredients, Rice's command of foreboding mood and tone throughout the novel is as impressive as it is appropriate to the dark, erotic and ultimately desperate tale she tells. Her writing is lush in scene and setting, as well as in exposing her myriad characters' considerable strengths and tragic failings. Particularly remarkable is her sensuous depiction of New Orleans -- in significant ways the book is nothing less show more than a letter of devotion to a voluptuous city she knows well and loves deeply, raising the city itself from merely a place where things happen to make it instead one of the book's most notable characters. This is an entrancing book, brimming with both sweeping historical narrative and present-day cautionary themes of the incurable devastation inevitably wrought by unchecked Oedipal lusts and hubristic familial sins. "The Witching Hour" is a grand and elegant fable well told, and worth reading. show less