The Witching Hour was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1990. At nearly a thousand pages, it is Rice’s longest novel and one of her most ambitious: a multi-generational saga of the Mayfair family, wealthy New Orleans witches who have been bound for thirteen generations to a spirit entity called Lasher.
The novel follows two parallel tracks. In the present, Rowan Mayfair — a neurosurgeon in San Francisco who has been raised away from the family and knows nothing of its history — is drawn back to New Orleans after the death of her adoptive mother reveals her true heritage. In the historical sections, the Talamasca — a secret order that studies the paranormal — has compiled a file on the Mayfair family spanning four centuries, from a Scottish woman burned as a witch in the 1600s through successive generations of Mayfair women, each of whom has been visited by Lasher: a seductive, visible spirit who grants them power in exchange for progressive steps toward his goal of incarnation in human flesh.
Rice’s research into New Orleans architecture, history, and culture is prodigious: the Mayfair house on First Street in the Garden District becomes a character in its own right — its rooms, its gardens, its history of births and deaths and hauntings rendered with the obsessive specificity that marks Rice’s best work. The genealogy of the Mayfair family — presented as excerpted from the Talamasca files — is itself a tour de force of invented history: thirteen generations of women, each with her own story, her own relationship to Lasher, her own way of wielding and being consumed by power.
Collecting The Witching Hour
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40
- Signed: $75–$200