The Witching Hour -
On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking. And the witching hour begins...Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches - a family given to poetry and incest, to murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.A hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult across four centuries, by the spellbinding, bestselling author of The Vampire Chronicles.
Published: 2004-11-04 (Arrow)
ISBN: 9780099471424
Language: English
Format: Paperback, 1207 pages
Goodreads' rating: -
Reviews
after reading most of the vampire chronicles, i decide to try Rice's Witches' trilogy... i know that for a lot of people, this book was hard to get through... there's a lot of information in it that seems like, "well who the hell cares????"... but it's all relevant in one way or another, and it SOOOOOOOOOOO sets you up for the subsequent novels, Lasher, and Taltos. (there's also Merrick, Blackwood Farm, and Blood Canticle, which came later.) if you can bear with a somewhat slow read for a little while, this book is really, really enjoyable... and if you believe in magic, natural magic, ghosts, things like that... well, then that just makes this book even better...
My favorite Anne Rice book of all time, anyone who reads this book will fall in love with New Orleans and Anne's writing. Not a vampire book, and I do love her vampires, but this is the best.
This book disturbed me with her descriptions of incest and child sexual abuse activities. It's not that I'm a prude. I understand these things happen in real life and many fine stories have tackled material like this successfully-Flowers in the Attic, Oedipus Rex, even Tolkien. It's that she writes these as steamy harlequin romance moments; as great sexual, erotic experiences that are to be championed. It's inappropriate and disturbing. Makes me wonder about her as a person. That being said, and those parts aside, the beginning of the book is interesting and I liked it a lot plotwise and characterwise, but when she starts to delve into the history of the Mayfair witches her characters become 2 dimensional cutouts that are really lame. All that matters is that they're good looking, charming,incestuous, while sometimes being very inappropriate with children as I earlier stated. It's this same plot over and over and over again with different Mayfair witches for literally hundreds of pages. I just can't plow through it all to get back to the part of the story I liked which does resurface at the end. I also find her representation of the black slaves insensitive & racist.