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The author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles—Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned—gives us now a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.
Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches—a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.
On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking... and The Witching Hour begins.
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher... a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien—the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers—provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing. And always—through peril and escape, tension and release—there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.
--front flap
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Previews available in: Spanish French English
Subjects
spirits, psychics, neurosurgeons, Fiction, Witchcraft, Ficción, Witches, Brujería, Sorcellerie, Fantasy fiction, Romans, nouvelles, Fiction, horror, Mayfair family (fictitious characters), fiction, New orleans (la.), fiction, Louisiana, fiction, German fiction, Translations from English, English fiction, Translations into German, German language materials, Fiction, occult & supernatural, Novela estadounidense, Traducciones al español, SorcièresShowing 10 featured editions. View all 30 editions?
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01
La hora de las brujas
September 28, 2005, Ediciones B
Paperback
in Spanish
- Tra edition
8466621318 9788466621311
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02
Le lien maléfique
2004-08, Robert Laffont, FLEUVE EDITIONS
Paperback
in French
2265079642 9782265079649
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03 |
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04
The Witching Hour
March 22, 1993, Ballantine Books
Mass Market Paperback
in English
- 1st U.S. Mass Market Ed edition
0345384466 9780345384461
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05
The Witching Hour
1993-05, Ballantine Books
Mass Market Paperback
in English
- 1st U.S. mass market edition
0345384466 9780345384461
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06
Le lien maléfique
1993-07, France Loisirs
Hardcover
in French
- Une édition du Club France Loisirs
2724273877 9782724273878
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08
The Witching Hour
1991-11, Ballantine Books
Trade Paperback
in English
- 1st Ballantine Books ed. (1)
0345367898 9780345367891
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The first in the Mayfair Witches series, The Witching Hour introduces the fictional Mayfair family of New Orleans, generations of male and female witches. This tight-knit and deeply connected family, where a death of one strengthens the others with his/her knowledge. One Mayfair witch per generation is also designated to receive the powers of "the man," known as Lasher. Lasher gives the witches gifts, excites them, and protects them. Unsure as to exactly what this spirit is, the Mayfair clan knows him variously as a protector, a god-like figure, a sexual being, and the image of death. Lasher's current witch is Deirdre, who lies catatonic from psycological shock treatments.
Deirdre's daughter, Rowan, has been spirited away from this "evil" and has happily become a neurosurgeon and has an uncanny gift to see the intent behind the facade. Rowan also has a gift few doctors possess--she can heal cells. Yet, though she uses it to save lives, she also fears that she hs caused several deaths. She rescues Michael from drowning. Michael then develops some extraordinary powers that compel him to seek New Orleans and to seek Rowan. He finds both, and pulls the tale closer together by meeting people connected to the Mayfair family who now fear Rowan because she is the first Mayfair who can kill without Lasher's help.
Michael dives into learning the history of the Mayfair witches: Deborah, Charlotte, Mary Beth, Stella, Antha, and many others across hundreds of years and three continents. When Michael looks up from his reading, he learns that Rowan has come to New Orleans to attend her mother's funeral. Rowan learns of her family history, her ancestral home in shambles, and Lasher waiting for the next one. Rowan dedicates herself to stopping Lasher's reign. Michael too has his own mission, but it is foggy and unclear to him. But Lasher is seductively powerful and Rowan's gifts offer him the opportunity to achieve his ultimate goal.
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Feedback?September 9, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
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