The Witching Hour is a novel originally published by Anne Rice in 1990. Rice, of course, is the author who became an immediate “overnight sensation” with the publication of her first novel Interview with the Vampire. That book and its sequels led to Rice rivaling Stephen King as the biggest brand name in horror fiction in the 1980s. With this novel, she made the move from vampires to witches as the introductory volume to a trilogy known as the Lives of the Mayfair Witches.
As with most novelists—only more so—Rice quickly established a definite style to her writing and so the easiest way to either recommend a novel by the author to anyone else or not recommend it is to inquire if they are already a fan. Those who enjoyed her vampire novels and erotic retelling of Sleeping Beauty and exploration of the world of mummies will more than likely to enraptured by her witches. Those who had trouble making it all the way through any individual book or who started in on one of her series but gave up before the concluding volume will likely not do any better with her witches. As for those coming to Anne Rice for the first time through the portal of The Witching Hour, the situation becomes more complicated.
The first thing a reader will quickly notice about this novel is that it was quite obviously written with a trilogy in mind. And therein lies what will be the biggest hurdle even for those readers who are already fans of the writer. The original hardcover edition of this novel stops just shy of reaching 1,000 pages. While there is certainly nothing wrong with a novel of such length by definition, it is perhaps informative and quite telling to know to learn that the third entry in the trilogy, Taltos, is quite literally not even half as long. In fact, the second and third books in this trilogy combined are just slightly longer than The Witching Hour by itself. Generally speaking, the trend for novels within a trilogy is to get progressively longer. While this is not an absolute rule, of course, it is rare for each successive entry to be shorter and extremely rare for the third book to be half the length of the first. This unusual structural quality to the trilogy helps to illuminate the difficulties of the book which commences the series. This novel and those that follow do contain a central narrative thread that for the sake of convenience can be termed a plot, but the plot is not really what this novel or the other two are about. In fact, the plots of the individual books are tangential at best to what can effectively be termed their existential rationale. It is no mere accident that The Witching Hour belongs to a series called Lives of the Mayfair Witches.
As mentioned, Rice either sat down one day with the idea of creating a trilogy that told a hugely expansive story covering generations of a family of witches or at some point during the writing of this novel realized this was the direction it was taking her. The result is that the overwhelming bulk of those nearly 1,000 pages is directed not to map out the plot of this novel, but to lay the groundwork for future novels. What was just described above can be one of the most fulfilling experiences a writer of fiction will ever have because, by the time a writer makes that commitment, they usually have a pretty clear vision of the big picture.
The reader of The Witching Hour, on the other hand, is being asked to make a considerable investment of time and energy on a faith. Picking up a copy of this book is not merely picking up a copy of this book. To readers the first line, “The doctor woke up afraid” becomes the first step of a commitment to read more than 2,000 pages because few readers choose to dive into the first book with a series with the commitment to read the first book and quit. By this point in her career, Rice was astute enough to know she was not writing just the story in this novel. She was writing the bait that would hook readers into making the long-term commitment.
This is where the problem with The Witching Hour for many of those who have already read it as well as all the potential readers to come is situated. Part One: Coming Together situates the backbone of the plot through the romance that develops between Dr. Rowan Mayfair and a man named Michael Curry who revives after he literally dies of drowning. This bizarre rescue has strange supernatural consequences for them both. Her medical practice is located in San Francisco and Michael is a contractor who feels a weird and uncanny urge to return to his hometown of New Orleans. Part One of this novel is essentially the story of their romance and the inevitable decision for them both to respond to the siren song being sent out from the Big Easy. After more than four hundred pages, Rowan finally shuts the door without looking back as the couple heads toward the Gulf Coast. The next page commences Part Two: The Mayfair Witches with a sudden shift in narrative tone, voice, and construction. The very first words of the first chapter of Part Two are “The File on the Mayfair Witches: Translator’s Foreword to Part I through IV.”
The momentum which has been building in the relationship between Rowan and Michael and the conflict which awaits them in New Orleans come to a jarring stop as the overall pace slows down considerably to introduce a secret society known as the Talamasca which is charged with keeping tabs on supernatural elements in the world like vampires and, yes, witches. A member of that organization called Aaron Lightner has compiled a study of the entire known history of the matriarchal lineage composing the Mayfair Witches and that study is presented in excruciating detail. In fact, in that Foreword, it is explicitly stated that “The translator has omitted nothing.” This is no mere hyperbole. The reader of the novel will spend literally the next few hundred pages learning far more than they really need to know about Charlotte Mayfair Fontenay who died in 1743 and Mary Beth Mayfair about whom more is known than any other of the witches since Charlotte despite there being a whole lot of information presented about those who became between. And then there is the story of Stuart Townsend who was born in Texas just before the dawn of the 20th century and, of course, the infamous Lionel Mayfair who wandered the halls with lunatic ravings about the devils in the sanitarium he was escaped to after shooting poor Stella. The reader learns a great deal about these and other members of the Mayfair clan over the course of these hundreds of pages, but the one member of the Mayfair Witches who is never mentioned during this section of the book is Dr. Rowan Mayfair.
Eventually comes the revelation of a concrete tie between this extensive history and it is admittedly an unexpected bombshell. It turns out that Michael is also a member of the family with he and Rowan sharing bloodlines reaching to Julien Mayfair who died in 1914. That is apparently far enough back in time to disallow any incestuous concerns over their shared lineage and so Rowan and Michael marry and conceive a child and is that conception that brings into the picture the title character of the second novel in the trilogy, Lasher, a weirdly ambiguous creature of pure spirit looking to find a bodily host. And it is this attempt by Lasher to take that fetus by force as his host that forms the actual plot of The Witching Hour.
The question that may be lingering in the minds of some potential readers is just how much of that history of the Mayfair Witches has any direct impact on the arrival of Lasher into the proceedings. And the answer for some of those readers is, unfortunately, it’s complicated. For the most part, that extended deep dive into ancestry research is pure texture. Some may find it fascinating and others may find it boring, but it does ultimately serve a purpose. The problem for readers of The Witching Hour is that this purpose often does not become clear until the next two books in the trilogy and yet without its presence in this volume, the full dimension of Lasher’s appearance in the plot would be lessened.
As previously indicated, Rice was not simply writing toward the plot of this novel when she was creating the elaborate backstory of her family of witches. She was planting the seeds of the future entries but did so in such a manner that much of the texture had to be included here rather than put off for later inclusion. The result is a book that feels bloated, definitely has pacing issues, and likely will discourage some from continuing through the entire trilogy.
