The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

First, I love the writing style of this author. Anne Rice is a masterful storyteller who brings her readers so deep into the worlds she creates within her novels, one cannot help but feel they have been transported. With her novel The Witching Hour, she has delivered full stop once more. As I turned the pages, I felt like had somehow been magically carried away, along with her characters, from the Garden District in New Orleans to San Francisco and back to New Orleans once more. 

Brief summary: Dr. Rowen Mayfair is a neurosurgeon in San Francisco who discovers after the death of her adoptive parents that she is not only an heiress to a massive fortune, an old Victorian mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans, but that she is the last in the family line of thirteen generations of witches stretching back to the 1600s in Scotland, and a spirit named Lasher haunts each generation of the Mayfair family, sending a good many of them spiraling down into madness. Can Rowan Mayfair, the current designated heiress and the family’s most powerful witch yet, triumph over this spirit who is convinced she is the one Mayfair he has been waiting for to help him finally become flesh and blood? Or will she succumb to his will and the madness that has taken all those who came before her? 

This is my second time reading The Witching Hour. I loved it this time around as much as the first, maybe more. The story of the Mayfair witches enthralled me from the opening paragraph until the last line. What I loved was that  is not a horror story or a tale about how witches are evil beings always in league with the devil. Instead, Rice weaves a story about a family of women and the legacy of powers they each inherit, how they get it, how they use it, and often how it overwhelms and destroys them with the help of a ghostly figure who may or may not be the devil and who has attached himself to this family—specifically the child born and anointed as the heiress of the family legacy in each generation.

The author has created a strong, complex plot that contains several storylines that will not only captivate, but will take you with ease through centuries and come together seamlessly. Rice’s characters are so fully developed, they come alive on the page to the point where, as a reader, I felt if I traveled to New Orleans, I would be able to find them. This is a masterpiece of a tale that combines historical fiction, romance, steamy sex, and suspense, along with an abundance of strange things that go bump in the night. This book has a prominent place on my keeper shelf. I highly recommend.