Novel: The Witching Hour

Overview
Anne Rice's The Witching Hour (1990) is the opening novel of the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. It introduces a sprawling New Orleans dynasty haunted by an enigmatic and persuasive spirit called Lasher, tracing how power, desire, and madness are transmitted through generations. The novel blends gothic atmosphere, occult speculation, and Rice's signature lush prose to map a family's long history of influence and ruin.

Plot
The story centers on Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant and solitary neurosurgeon who unexpectedly inherits the Mayfair fortune and its ancient mansion. As Rowan is drawn into the family fold she encounters investigators from the Talamasca, scholars of paranormal phenomena who have chronicled the Mayfairs for decades. Their files and interviews interweave with Rowan's own experience, revealing the slow accretion of ritual, obsession, and psychic inheritance that binds the family together.
Rice structures the narrative as a mosaic of contemporary action, archival documents, and long-form memories that reach back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through a series of biographical vignettes, the novel recounts how successive Mayfair women developed peculiar gifts, how a pattern of sexual transgression and secrecy repeatedly reshaped their destinies, and how Lasher, alternately an invisible presence, a dream figure, and a dangerously seductive voice, manipulated events to preserve his hold on the bloodline. The modern plot culminates in unsettling revelations about lineage and choice, leaving Rowan to confront whether power inherited under coercive, supernatural influence can ever be disentangled from the self.

Major Characters
Rowan Mayfair is the novel's emotional center: independent, scientific, and yet haunted by a legacy she did not seek. Lasher functions as both antagonist and dark architect, charismatic in his intimations and ruthless in pursuit of continuity. The Talamasca appears as a collective character, its archivists and interrogators supplying a skeptical, ethnographic counterpoint to the family's occult claims.
Surrounding figures, ancestors whose names and tragedies populate the Mayfair ledger, serve as embodiments of recurring themes: mothers and daughters bound by secrecy, men who alternately prop up or destroy family fortunes, and peripheral witnesses whose records stitch together a history of ritual and obsession. Rice invests these characters with vivid particulars, making the long lineage feel alive even as it sinks into supernatural entanglement.

Themes and Style
The Witching Hour interrogates inheritance in multiple registers: genetic, psychic, social, and economic. Rice probes how privilege and pathology can be indistinguishable when both are passed down in the same breath. Questions of free will, culpability, and identity recur as Rowan and others attempt to determine whether they are actors in their own lives or vessels for an older will. Religion, science, and folklore collide, with the Talamasca's rational methods standing in uneasy contrast to ritual and madness.
Stylistically the novel is ornate and immersive. Rice's prose luxuriates in description and interiority, while her use of epistolary fragments, legal records, and oral testimony builds a sense of documentary weight. The result is a dense, hypnotic narrative that privileges mood and lineage over linear plot speed.

Legacy
As the first volume of the Mayfair trilogy, The Witching Hour establishes the saga's major conflicts and tonal register, setting the stage for deeper exploration of Lasher's nature and the mysterious race known as the Taltos in later books. The novel drew praise for its ambition and atmosphere and provoked debate for its explicit themes and morally ambiguous characters. It remains a central, controversial work in Rice's oeuvre, notable for extending her fascination with immortality, power, and the complicated inheritance of the human heart.