Witching Hour, The

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The Witching Hour

Publisher's info
Title:	The Witching Hour
Author:	Anne Rice
Publisher:	Knopf Penguin Random House
1st printing:	October 19th, 1990
ISBN:	ISBN 0-394-58756-3
Page count:	976 (HC)
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The Witching Hour is an American novel of the witchcraft, generational lore, and supernatural thriller subgenres of horror. It is the first book in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches series and was written by author Anne Rice. It was published by Knopf and first released in hardcover edition on October 19th, 1990. The book has also been made available in paperback format, e-book, and audiobook.

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.