Americans can swallow anything if sex is the lure. The fact that the letters are packed with sexual scrimmages (and incest, no less) helps. To Rice’s credit, she makes the epistolary interruption work. Using epistles to advance the story is another volatile invention, because if the reader does not like the first-person voice of the letter the thread is broken. A student of witchcraft, he follows Deborah’s 20-year-old daughter Charlotte ( his daughter as it happens) to Port-au-Prince, where she flees to escape a charge of witchcraft against herself.Ĭonveniently, Abel keeps a file on the Mayfair witches, which he sends to his comrades in the Talamasca, an order formed in the 14th Century for the study of the supernatural and whose members often possessed supernatural powers themselves-white witches, if you will.īreaking up the time sequence of a novel always is a risky device. In the hands of a less-skilled writer that’s all this scene would have accomplished, but Rice uses it to spur on a witness to this disaster, a former lover of Deborah’s, one Petyr van Abel. It’s a scene that satisfies emotionally because the “bad guys” die. The doomed Deborah at least enjoys melancholy exaltation as she destroys her accusers by unleashing a storm upon their heads. This beauty (the witches always are beautiful) is accused by her mother-in-law of sleeping with Satan and murdering her husband. The execution of Comtesse Deborah Mayfair de Montcleve in September, 1689, in the town of Montcleve, France, is one such scene. This idea allows Rice to create vampires, witches and demons who can be figures that excite our compassion, most especially in their deaths. This is a concept repellent and alien to Christians, but something Hindus always have known. Renewal through destruction and regeneration through violence drive the plots of Rice’s “supernatural” novels. In “The Witching Hour,” as in her vampire chronicles, she attacks the idea that good and evil are polar opposites. Rice must be wearing the Mayfair emerald herself, since she writes with hypnotic power. At least one female per generation, the one who wears the Mayfair emerald, has exercised this power in worldly ways and has come to a tragic, mournful end. Generation after generation, since the first Mayfair woman landed on American soil after fleeing a slave insurrection in Haiti, these women have had incredible power.

The multiple generations of Mayfair women in the house on First Street are strange.

Rice thoroughly enjoys herself as she slides through 17th-Century France, the fetid plantations in Port-au-Prince, the pain of the Civil War South and the seeming “normalcy” of today’s San Francisco and New Orleans.

The witching hour anne rice book