The witching hour Book

My witchathon concludes with The Witching Hour, the eleventh novel by Anne Rice. Published in 1990, I was hoping it might be the author's thirteenth book, but this goth epic of blood, sugar, sex and black magic is a monster as is. The word count is 327,360 words, 10,000 shy of Stephen King's baby high chair Under the Dome. Rice is a gifted scenarist who sets the table for adult horror dripping with sensuality and dread, the type moviegoers had to imagine in the 1940s with thrillers like Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie. While her atmosphere is combustible, her storytelling skills are flaccid and I reached a point where I just wanted this to end.

The novel gets off impressively. Chapters one through six alternate between three main characters and three citizens of New Orleans: a doctor, a priest and a woman who marries into a family owned funeral parlor. These locals are traumatized by their experiences with Deirdre Mayfair, a woman in her late 40s and heir to a family fortune. Deirdre has existed in a catatonic state for thirty years since her child was taken away from her to be raised by a cousin in California. Cared for by her sister Carlotta, Deirdre wastes away in a grand but decaying house on First Street, spook central for stories the nuns tell naughty children about witches in the Garden District.

The doctor, the priest and the woman have at one time wanted to help cure Deirdre or reunite her with her daughter, but find the heir to the Mayfair fortune to be lost in her own world, as well as controlled not only by feared attorney Miss Carl, but a strange man that has been seen near her for years. Each of our do-gooders has had an encounter with that man and unburden themselves to inquiring mind Aaron Lightner, an Englishman who's part historian and part psychic detective for a transcontinental organization called the Talamasca, which in addition to investigating vampires and ghosts, has kept tabs on the Mayfair family for generations.

Lightner had proved an excellent listener, responding gently without ever interrupting, But the doctor did not feel better. In fact, he felt foolish when it was over. As he watched Lightner gather up the little tape recorder and put it in his briefcase, he had half a mind to ask for the tape.

It was Lightner who broke the silence as he laid down several bills over the check.

"There is something I must explain to you," he said. "I think it will ease your mind.:

What could possibly do that?

"You remember," Lightner said, "that I told you I collect ghost stories."

"Yes."

"Well, I know of that old house in New Orleans. I've seen it. And I've recorded other stories of people who have seen the man you described."

The doctor was speechless. The words had been said with utter conviction. In fact, they had been spoken with such authority and assurance that the doctor believed them without doubt. He studied Lightener in detail for the first time. The man was older than he seemed on first inspection. Perhaps sixty-five, even seventy. The doctor found himself captivated again by Lightner's expression, so affable and trusting, so inviting of trust in return.

"Others," the doctor whispered. "Are you sure?"

"I've heard other accounts, some very like your own. And I tell you this so you understand that you didn't imagine it. And so it doesn't continue to prey on your mind. You couldn't have helped Deirdre Mayfair, by the way. Carlotta Mayfair would never have allowed it. You ought to put the entire incident out of your mind. Don't ever worry about it again."

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, forty-eight year old Michael Curry has plied himself with beer and shut himself indoors while the news media stake him out. Pulled from the bay and revived after drowning, the New Orleans native and restorer of old houses has discovered an unwanted talent for psychometry, picking up psychic visions off any object he touches. Donning leather gloves to blunt the effect, Michael received a vision while clinically dead of others instructing him that he had some purpose to fulfill, but can't remember what it is he's supposed to do. He compels his doctor to track down his rescuer, hoping he might have spoken about his vision to them.

Michael's savoir is Rowan Mayfair, thirty year old board-certified Staff Attending in Neurosurgery. Rejecting a promising career in research, Rowan has found her calling in trauma surgery. Raised by wealthy adoptive parents in Tiburon and recently orphaned, she recharges her batteries after a fifteen-hour shift by taking her yacht, the Sweet Christine into Richardson Bay and then the open sea. The cabin of the yacht has been the location of Rowan's other favorite pasttime, taking select cops, firemen or first responders she picks up in neighborhood bars for recreational sex.

Rowan has followed Michael's story in the tabloids and wants to contact him for far more than professional courtesy. There are three people Rowan knows of that she's has killed by thought, most recently, her philandering adoptive father who threatened to leave Rowan's terminally ill adoptive mother unless Rowan slept with him. Michael's experience with psychic phenomena make him one of her people, while his rough and tumble build, blue eyes and worker's hands cloaked in leather have their allure to her as well. Rowan takes Michael to her home and in addition to vividly describing the mystique of New Orleans and San Francisco, Rice demonstrates her facility for writing hot sex.

When he saw her breasts through the thin covering of nylon, he kissed them through the cloth, deliberately teasing himself, his tongue touching the dark circle of the nipple before he forced the cloth away. What did it feel like, the black leather touching her skin, caressing her nipples? He lifted her breasts, kissing the hot curve of them underneath--he loved this particular juicy crevice--then he sucked the nipples hard, one after the other, rubbing and gathering the flesh feverishly with the palm of his hand.

She was twisting under him, her body moving helplessly it seemed, her lips grazing his unevenly shaven chin, then all soft and sweet over his mouth, her hands slipping into his shirt and feeling his chest as if she loved the flatness of it.

She pinched his nipples as he suckled hers. He was so hard he was going to spill. He stopped, rose on his hands, and tried to catch his breath, then sank down next to her. He knew she was pulling off her jeans. He brought her close, feeling the smooth flesh of her back, then moving down to the curve of her soft clutchable and kneadable little bottom.

No waiting now, he couldn't. In a rage of impatience he took off his glasses and shoved them on the bedside table. Now she would be a lush soft blur to him, but all the physical details he'd seen were ever present in his mind. He was on top of her. Her hand moved against his crotch, unzipped his pants, and brought out his sex, roughly, slapping it as if to test its hardness--a little gesture that almost brought him over the edge. He felt the prickly curling thatch of pubic hair, the heated inner lips, and finally the tight pulsing sheath itself as he entered.

I did mention that The Witching Hour is 327,360 words, so, if you like the supernatural and erotica, Anne Rice has more. A lot more.

After three rounds of world class sex, Michael takes leave of Rowan to make a flight to New Orleans (he'd booked his passage before they officially met). Michael feels pulled to his hometown and after picking up no clues from Rowan or her boat, believes the riddle behind his vision lies in the Big Easy. Michael has many memories of the city, particularly a house on First Street in the Garden District his mother would take him past on walks and where a strange man watched him from the porch. Drunk, Michael heads straight for that house and sees the man again. He passes out.

When Michael recovers, he finds himself at the Pontchartrain Hotel with Aaron Lightner. The Englishman attempted to make contact with Michael in San Francisco, intrigued by his psychometric talents, and is operating under the impression that Rowan Mayfair hired Michael to do some work for her in New Orleans. Through much exposition, Lightner reveals that Rowan is heir to a vast family fortune here in the Crescent City and that house that Michael has been obsessed with--and everything in it--belongs to her. He convinces Michael to come with him to a motherhouse the Talamasca has in Metairie, where he is given a file to read on the Mayfair Witches.

Back in San Francisco, Rowan is awakened by a presence. She finds a man standing on the dock who dims away. In the morning, Rowan receives a call from Carlotta Mayfair. Miss Carl is unaware that Rowan's adoptive mother is deceased and has to notify her niece that her birth mother Deirdre passed away that morning. She warns Rowan to avoid New Orleans at all costs. The doctor ignores her. Michael makes progress on the file of the Mayfair Witches, which goes back twelve generations and spans Scotland, France and New Orleans in an orgy of persecution, personal fortune, and madness, with "that man," who goes by the name Lasher, waiting in the wings.

Though Deirdre has slumbered in a twilight induced by drugs all of her adult life, there have been countless sightings by those around her of "a mysterious brown-haired man." Nurses in St. Ann's Asylum claimed to have seen him--"some man going into her room! Now I know I saw that." At a Texas hospital where she was incarcerated briefly, a doctor claimed to have seen "a mysterious visitor" who always "seemed somehow to just disappear when I wanted to question him or ask him who he was."

At least one nurse in a northern Louisiana sanitarium insisted to her superiors that she had seen a ghost. Black orderlies in various hospitals saw "that man all the time." One woman told us, "He not human. I know him when I see him. I see spirits. I call them up. I know him and he know me and he don't come near me at all."

Most workmen cannot work on the First Street house any more today than they could in the days when Deirdre was a girl. There are the same old stories. There is even some talk of "a man around here" who doesn't want things done.

The strengths of The Witching Hour and part of what has driven Anne Rice up the bestseller's charts over the years is her command of prose while trafficking in the supernatural and the sensual. Her attention to detail--whether it's describing a witch burning in the 17th century or a crumbling Irish Catholic church in the present--is so good. Rather than ride a marketable genre to its obvious and boring conclusions, Rice paints vivid pictures of places and people. She knows cities. She knows Catholicism. I liked how a family owned funeral parlor in New Orleans knows where all the bodies are buried and keep quiet about more than they'll ever reveal, and this is one minor character.

I loved how Rice's characters who've come in close contact with the Mayfair witches are suffering from the same trauma as a motorist buzzed by a UFO; they've experienced something they can't explain and want answers. In another excellent stroke, Rice stumbles onto the conceit of renovating a haunted house, confident enough to cite novels about great houses like Great Expectations or Rebecca by name and in addition to crafting home design porn that matches her skin porn, raises compelling questions about whether new tenants and new fixtures are enough to drive out bad energy hovering around an old house.

The problem with The Witching Hour is that it's two stories: a back story about witches that's exciting and a front story about modern lovers that's lame. Rice doesn't like Rowan Mayfair much--the author's sympathies lie with her tragic men while her women seem to be asking for whatever misfortune is visited on them--and the neurosurgeon has a cunning that felt robotic to me. Rowan and Michael do spend a lot of time crying, but the machinery of their romance made me want to get back to the flesh and blood of the witches. And 327,360 words is too damn long. Rosemary's Baby had a far more compelling story and characters trapped in a web of black magic and deceit and at 79,360 words, can be read in a quarter of the time.