Aoibhínn's Reviews > The Witching Hour

The Mayfair's are an extremely powerful and wealthy family, in each generation there is a chosen one, a witch, who inherits not only the family home and money, but supernatural powers and an evil entity, named Lasher, who only has one aim – to become human again.

The Witching Hour is an extremely long novel, 1207 pages, but don't let that put you off reading as once you open the first page you soon find yourself completely absorbed in the chilling tale of the Mayfair Witches. This novel has a spellbinding, engrossing, well-written tale with complex and mysterious characters. There are plenty of compelling twists and turns in the plot to keep you interested and the suspense is drawn out to perfection. The novel is completely unpredictable, I found the ending to be quite a shock!

The settings of each generation of the family, from the plantations on Haiti to the modern day gothic mansion in New Orleans, are so richly described that you can easily imagine yourself there in those places. In fact, I loved all Anne Rice's vivid descriptions of New Orleans and the house on First Street, I found this really added to the intensity of the story.

There was a section in the middle, of about 300 pages or more, describing the history of the Mayfair family, the whole 12 generations of the family! I found this section quite tiresome and entirely too long, which is why I'm giving this novel four stars instead of five. I wished the author had shortened this section.

The characters were all quite complex, fascinating and well-developed. Anne Rice spent a lot of time explaining the motives behind her characters and why they react the way they do to situations in the novel. It also made me feel that I knew each individual character very well. Throughout the novel, I felt myself feeling both sympathy and anger towards the character of Rowan.

Beware, if you try to read this novel in paperback format, your eyes and wrists will be sore for about a week!


Four stars!