The Witching Hour
Locus Award for Best Horror Novel 1991.
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 a long-ago Amsterdam and 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.
Anne Rice
Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien; 1941–2021) was an American author of gothic fiction, Christian literature, and erotic literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. Books from The Vampire Chronicles were the subject of two film adaptations - Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Queen of the Damned (2002).
Born in New Orleans, Rice spent much of her early life there before moving to Texas, and later to San Francisco. She was raised in an observant Catholic family but became an agnostic as a young adult. She began her professional writing career with the publication of Interview with the Vampire in 1976, while living in California, and began writing sequels to the novel in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, following a publicized return to Catholicism, Rice published the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, fictionalized accounts of certain incidents in the life of Jesus. Several years later she distanced herself from organized Christianity, citing disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church's stances on social issues but pledging that faith in God remained "central to [her] life." However, she later considered herself a secular humanist.
Lives of the Mayfair Witches
Lives of the Mayfair Witches consists of three books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
