The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
"The Witching Hour" is a supernatural novel that centers on Michael Curry, a successful contractor in San Francisco who undergoes a life-altering near-death experience after a near-drowning incident. Rescued by a mysterious woman, he discovers that he has developed a unique ability to perceive the lives and events associated with objects and people through touch. This newfound power, however, comes with a sense of confusion and a promise made to otherworldly beings during his traumatic experience.
As Michael grapples with his abilities, he becomes a celebrity but ultimately retreats from the public eye, seeking solitude and understanding. His journey intertwines with Rowan Mayfair, a talented surgeon with her own supernatural gifts and a troubled history linked to her family's legacy of witchcraft. Their relationship deepens as they uncover shared connections to New Orleans, where secrets from their pasts begin to surface.
The narrative explores themes of power, love, and the struggle against malevolent forces, particularly embodied by Lasher, a spectral entity that threatens the Mayfair family. As Michael and Rowan confront the challenges tied to their abilities and ancestral ties, the story delves into the complexities of identity and destiny within a richly woven tapestry of occult lore.
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The Witching Hour
First published: 1990
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Fantasy—mythological
Time of work: The mid-seventeenth century to the late twentieth century
Locale: France; Holland; Haiti; San Francisco, California; and New Orleans, Louisiana
The Plot
Michael Curry, a successful forty-eight-year-old San Francisco contractor, has his life blighted by a near-death experience. After slipping off rocks and almost drowning in San Francisco Bay, he is rescued by a mysterious woman in a passing boat. He discovers that by touching objects and people with his hands, he acquires access to other lives and events. These insights are fragmentary, as is his memory of an encounter with otherworldly beings during his drowning, when he promised to fulfill a mission for them. He discusses his occult powers with the press and becomes a celebrity, a confusing development that he rejects by becoming a recluse and shutting down his business.
One of Michael’s doctors puts him in touch with his rescuer, who Michael believes will help him understand what he is meant to do with his occluded occult knowledge. His rescuer, Rowan Mayfair, is a superb surgeon, thirty years old, and an ash-blonde beauty. Michael falls in love with her. She, like Michael, is searching for answers. She has the power to hurt and to heal people. She can stop a patient’s bleeding by a laying on of hands; she also can cause a person’s heart attack or stroke if she does not control her rage. Her obsession with saving people is her effort at self-redemption. Michael hopes that touching Rowan and her boat will bring back his sense of mission, and Rowan hopes that Michael will help reveal her past.
Rowan’s adoptive mother died recently, and the terms of her will have extracted from Rowan the pledge that she will never return to New Orleans, her birth family’s home. Michael, she soon learns, grew up in New Orleans. Rowan and Michael realize that their fate is linked to New Orleans, where as a boy Michael developed a fixation on a Garden District mansion that turns out to be Rowan’s ancestral home. There he saw a spectral man, the Mayfairs’ presiding spirit. Michael’s intense memories of his childhood are connected, he is sure, with his near-death experience. When Rowan’s birth mother dies, she is visited by the spectral man, and she decides that she must break her word to her adoptive mother and return to New Orleans.
Hovering around this couple is Aaron Lightner, an agent in the Talamasca, a secret order of occult scholars. Through Aaron, Michael learns that Rowan is the descendant of a family of witches, a matriarchy that has fascinated the Talamasca for nearly three hundred years. Rowan is initiated, first by Lightner and then by her own family members, into the Mayfair connection with the occult. A strong woman, she believes she can destroy Lasher, the spectral man, who has driven Mayfairs mad and killed many others in an attempt to possess the Mayfair witches and to find a way to become a creature of flesh himself, a kind of superhuman being. Like the other Mayfair witches, Rowan loses control of Lasher, who invades the cells of her fetus and emerges as a powerful boy-man. Unable to prevent this monstrous denouement, Michael is left in the Mayfair mansion, still believing that Rowan will triumph and return to him from her foreign adventures with Lasher.