The Witching Hour: 1 (Lives of Mayfair Witches) by Anne Rice

Rom the writer of the wonderful Vampire Chronicles comes to a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult via 4 centuries. Demonstrating, once again, her presence for spellbinding storytelling and the advent of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a high-quality dynasty of witches–an own circle of relatives given to poetry and to incest, to homicide and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted through a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.

On the veranda of a high-quality New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile lady sits rocking . . . and The Witching Hour starts. It starts in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a lovely lady, a terrific practitioner of neurosurgery–conscious that she has unique powers however unaware that she comes from a historical line of witches–reveals the drowned frame of a person off the coast of California and brings him to existence.

He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in formative years through fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his short interval of death, has obtained a sensory strength that mystifies and frightens him.

As those two, fiercely interested in every other, fall in love and–in passionate alliance–got down to remedy the thriller of her beyond and his unwelcome present, the unconventional moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château withinside the France of Louis XIV.

A complex story of evil unfolds–an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, in which the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, evokes the spirit she names Lasher . . . an advent that spells her very own destruction and torments every one of her descendants in turn.

From the espresso plantations of Port au Prince, in which the terrific Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy in their darkish strength is nearly destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien–the clan’s best male to be endowed with occult powers–offers for the dynasty its foothold in America, the darkish, luminous tale encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing.

And always–via peril and escape, anxiety and release–there swirl around us the echoes of everlasting war: innocence as opposed to the corruption of the spirit, sanity towards madness, existence towards death. With a dreamlike strength, the unconventional attracts us, via circuitous, twilight paths, to the prevailing and Rowan’s increasing number of stimulated and volatile movements withinside the cruel sport that binds her to her heritage.

And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of own circle of relatives sagas is introduced to its startling climax.