The Witching Hour by Ann Rice – a ramble

The Witching Hour is one of about a dozen books that I reread every so often, thought I must admit usually I just read the sections on the history of the Mayfair Witches. When I picked it up this year (Futile Flame by Sam Stone sparked that need to reread) my husband asked why I only read that part. I told him it was because I didn’t like the lead in the rest of the book, Rowan Mayfair, but then I asked myself if that was true, since it had been a few years since I’d read it. So This time when I read all thousand pages, I kept notes about my likes and dislikes. This isn’t exactly a review, and probably isn’t professional enough to be an essay, so I’m sticking to ramble.

My copy of The Witching House is yellowed. It’s been with me through high school, early high school if not before, since Ann Rice was one of the first adult section authors I picked up. Odd, now that I think of it, that The Witching Hour has been more of a reread than any other Rice book, in fact there are many Rice books I haven’t made it through.

Likewise the cover of my copy is long gone, though, worried about the wear it would get on another read, I took the time to give my copy a new cover. Mine is less sexy, but at this point I doubt “Spoiler Alert” should apply.

My copy is from the 28th mass market printing which puts it around 1994 or 95. The Witching Hour is about, in about equal parts, a creepy old house in New Orleans’ Garden District, Rowan Mayfair–a powerful witch and heir to a massive, and possibly cursed fortune, and Lasher–the powerful, possibly malevolent ghost haunting the Mayfair family.

Reader who decide to pick this one up should be warned that while Rice’s style is lush, erotic and gorgeous, it’s also, when looked at closer, purple, repetitive and wandering almost to the point of ineffectual. My copy clocks in at 1038 pages, and it easily could have been half of that.

What I’m not as sure about is: Would it have been as effective?

The book begins telling about Deidre Mayfair, an invalid living in the old house, who has a mysterious, one might say ghostly, visitor often at her side. It becomes almost immediately evident on this storyline, that Deidre is being medicated into incoherence and might (probably) be completely capable and sane under he haze of drugs. But someone is making sure that even doctors don’t have the choice to take her off the meds. So this is a major Tragedy, as well as foreshadowing and a ceaseless source of character guilt later on. Almost everyone guilts themselves for not doing anything to help Deidre throughout the book, almost immediately after each guilt trip the reader is reassured that there was probably nothing they could have done anyway.

So Rice builds up a tremendous amount of emotion surrounding this character that is doing nothing, and that no one, really, is trying to help. Yes, this sets the mood for the whole book.

Next readers are introduced to Michael Curry, a wealthy, possibly crazy contractor, who drowns at sea, but it miraculously found and revived by Dr. Rowan Mayfair. When he comes back he remembers a very strange afterlife experience and he possesses the ability of psychometry (the ability to read impressions from objects). But Michael’s gift is completely out of his control and he becomes a recluse. Conveniently he shares lots of memories of Deidre Mayfair, the house in New Orleans, and of Lasher, this mysterious ghost who completely isn’t a ghost yet, though he obviously is.

Through Michael we also finally meet Rowan Mayfair, who is also rich without having done much but benefit (a lot) from being filthy rich. Like new cars and houses and boats where she can really be herself rich. She’s aloof, beautiful, a neurosurgeon who is damn near perfect. Seriously blood doesn’t run in her veins, awesomesauce peppered with humbleness does. And even though Michael is like twenty years older than Rowan (at least) she is so very hot for him because Rowan has an extreme hunger for big rough sexy hero-like men (because she’s hiding some seriously deep guilt about being totally evil and buries herself in hot hero men to try to be a good guy, but we’ll get to that later).

Michael is, of course completely flattered that this hot, brainy, beautiful chick wants him and much obsessing about each other commences. (You’ll hear a lot about how sexy arm hair is.) What follows is a lot od half-drunk ramblings about the nature of Michael’s power and about all his memories of that house at First Street and about how very hot Rowan thinks Michael is.

Michael decides to go to New Orleans to figure things out. Rowan remains at her home (where her stepdad and adoptive mother just died) because of a super secret promise she made to her adoptive mother never to go to New Orleans. (So mysterious right?) In New Orleans Michael learns that Deidre has died. He drinks himself sick, and a strange man finds him outside the First Street, taking him to be cared for. Michael learns that this man is Aaron, from a super secret organization that watches and records cases of paranormal beasties and powers. Aaron was going to California to meet Michael (because of his psychometry) but instead he too, heard that Deidre had died and is in New Orleans to record her funeral for the Talamasca (which readers might recognize–as well as Aaron himself–from Queen of the Damned, making The Witching Hour almost a spin off from Rice’s vampire series.)

Meanwhile in California Rowan gets a strange late night visit from a ghostly man. The next morning she gets a call for her adoptive mother and subsequently learns that her birth mother is dead, and she is now the owner of the exact same house in the Garden District that Michael loved. Against the caller’s wishes and her adoptive mother’s wishes Rowan decided to go to New Orleans for the funeral, and knows she will never return to her California life.

In New Orleans Michael is given the Talamasca’s file on the Mayfair family (which of course, Rowan is a part of) and spends a few days reading it. Rowan arranges for a flight, packs and flies to New Orleans. On the flight the ghost has sex with her.

The History of the Mayfair Witches is usually the only part I read. It starts about 270 pages into the book (yes, the story so far has been nearly 300 pages) and runs to page 668, making this section a novel on its own. This is the part I read because this is the only real part I find to be atmospheric but not overdone, and lovely, but to the point as well. almost every character is fleshy and realized without tons of redundancies. In this section as a reader I find I can properly enjoy the depth and richness of Rice’s style without yawning.

This section ends with Rowan arriving to her mother’s funeral and, in shock, meeting her family for the first time ever. Aaron is also here, standing in for Michael (who is still reading). The whole huge mysterious secret that the first third of the book is focused on is now completely revealed, except the reader already knew it. Rowan is a witch with real powers. Her family is haunted by Lasher, who isn’t a ghost, but is something else, she is Deidre’s daughter and Deidre’s great aunt, Carlotta, is an evil bitch who somehow, against all odds, managed to keep Deidre drugged into nothingness for like 30 years. All on her powers over evil-old-lady-ness. (And yes, she’s a lawyer. If you haven’t guessed yet every single person of importance in this book is rich and white, powerful in every single way or a terribly tragic victim of said powerful people.)

The next section is the most la-la-land fantasy of it all. Here Rowan and Michael decide they want to restore the old house (which somehow miraculously has nothing big wrong with it despite being completely not maintained for about sixty years, meanwhile our house had some pretty big problems from being empty for 9 months before we bought it, and we’re not considered subtropical, environmentally like New Orleans is.) Anyway, so Michael restores the house, with a completely limitless budget, because not only is he a millionaire in his own right, Rowan is like rich rich. Like Bill Gates thinks Rowan Mayfair is ludicrously rich. Readers are told a lot how rich Rowan and all the characters are, if not directly, then by little things, like Rowan paying cash for two Mercedes.

Then after another three hundred pages of shopping, house restoration and “I think something bad is going to happen, remember the ghost”, “Why hasn’t the ghost done anything bad yet?” and such Rice remembers that all this foreshadowing needs to lead up to something. So Rowan begins to talk to the ghost trying to find out what it wants from the witches, and from her in particular. Meanwhile she also proceeds to have violent, crazy ghost sex with it while Michael closes up his old house and business in California and worries because Rowan isn’t as obsessed with him as she had been.

Finally despite being three novels in length Rice can’t even come up with an actual ending and leaves the book pretty much on a cliffhanger, which Rowan giving birth to the ghost and vanishing and Michael nearly drowning in the pool.

And the thing is, all this doesn’t even approach the crazy of the next two books wherein a thirteen year old girl seduces and gets pregnant by Michael and gives birth to another ghost-thing (after about 3 months of pregnancy).

Now, keep in mind that Rice’s prose really is gorgeous. She spin out the mood of desolation and madness very well. But by the time I was finished there was just so much build up, so much foreshadowing that never happened, so much crap about Rowan shopping and Michael having a limitless budget, and them obsessing over each other when I, as a reader never got attached enough to either one of them to even like them, that the complete lack of any kind of resolution and all the damn hints and teasers about mysteries that never, ever come to fruition that I was just so very done with it.

Why don’t I like the book? It’s too repetitive. It’s too long. Michael and Rowan do little but lead lives that the rich and powerful only dream of, obsess about each other and complain (about their wonderful lives), and worry endlessly about the ghost (and remember Rowan’s pretty much fucking the thing the whole time.) The ending is off, and there is this really overblown insane obsession for incest. Seriously, everyone is related to the person they’re married to in this book and it’s so casual that the Mayfair family picks their mates from the family with the same casualness as most men pick out their shoes.

So why do I love the book? It’s dark, slick, sexy, vibrant and a twisted, masterful tale that spans three hundred years and thirteen generations. every setting is like watching a movie, you wonder the whole time whether the money and power is worth the Tragedy(exclamation point) and whether Lasher is totally evil, or the loyal servant he claims to be. Rice gets the idea of alien creature, and witches falling prey to the spirits they deal with because spirits and humans don’t think or define things the same and they certainly don’t see things on the same time line. But this victory achieved doesn’t feel like the one that Rice is actually working toward. It seems almost accidental, the glory and beauty of the book stumbled upon in a hot mess of drama and chaos.

Reading The Witching Hour is like thinking while you’re doing an unpleasant tedious chore, where you have some good thoughts, even a few revelations in that time, but it’s still mired in tediousness and a million other less pleasant thoughts. It’s still on my list of rereads, but now that the itch has passed I’m very glad I can put this tome back on the shelf and point myself to this ramble when I wonder next “Why don’t I read the whole thing?”