If you go to http://www.extasybooks.com/eb. php3?ebookid=18853 you can have a look at my latest wor...
If you go to http://www.extasybooks.com/eb. php3?ebookid=18853 you can have a look at my latest work.
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"The Witching Hour" takes us out of Anne Rice's familiar vampire world, but not very far. We are back in New Orleans, where the air seems to be full of exotic, slightly sickening perfumes, and strange things lurk on almost every corner.
"The Witching Hour" is the first in a series - "Lasher" and "Taltos" follow it, although given the huge bulk of this book, you'd be forgiven for wondering if there is any more story to tell.
This isn't an easy book to unravel - largely due to the blk and the unconventional family it centres on. At the heart of the tale are the mayfair witches - 13 generations of women linked by the sort of complicated incestuous relationships that will make your ehad hurt if you try to keep track of them. I considered making up some sort of diogram as I went along, but soon realised our language does not have the words to express what you get when if you dip into the same gene pool that often. In terms of the book, what you get are powerful women with unusual gifts, who are bound to serve/be served by a rather sinister spirit called Lasher. It looks very much like the spirit wears the trousers in this relationship.
Rice traces the history of the thirteen generations, in all their convolutions, and this takes up the vast bulk of the book. For reasons best known to herself, she presents the information mostly as a report on the family. If I said it was dry reading, I would be guilty of gross understatement. For light relief, we have at the same time a contemporary tale of a bloke called Michael Curry, who has returned from a near death exerience with some odd powers of his own and the impression of a mission from the dead. He soon gets tangled up with Rowan Mayfair, witch number 13, who is trying to find out who and what she is. They have a romance, a fairly angsty one at that.
If New Orleans wasn't familair enough, Rice readers will soon feel at home with the Talamasca creeping about and getting involved - the talamasca is a sectret society devoted to ivnestigating strange stuff - very x-files like, only not linked to any government. Aaron Lightner providwes most of the dreaded background information.
The plot is amazingly complex, and is constructed in such a way that you really do have to plough through 13 generations of not very pelasant and soon forgotten women just to make any sense of what's going on. If you want to read the following two books, you need to do a fair job of understanding and remembering it as well, which is no mean feat. The book lacks pace and momentum, which is a real let down. Furthermore, there are so many of these mayfair women, that you rpidly stop really caring about most of them - they aren't horrid enough to be interesting, they aren't nice enough to be sympathetic, and largely they are just frustrating. You get the odd one or two who stand out, but its hard to care what happens to this family. There is almost no resolution in this book - and while the next two take you further into things (and are lots shorter)there are no satisfying conclusions. It doesn't really go anywhere that I found interesting.
The odds are that die hard Rice fans will read this just because, and will wallow in the atmosphere and put up with the lack of pace. If you were looking for blood and gore horror, or psychological horror, then this book probably won't suit - what little there is is so immersed in everything else, and it certainly isn't scary. If you have many, many hours to kill and only room to take one book, and you've already read all those huge Russian epics and are looking for something to try your patience, give it a go, you might just like it!
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On the verandah of a great New Orleans house now faded a mute and fragile woman sits ... more
rocking. And the witching hour begins...Demonstrating once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend Anne Rice makes real for us a gre...
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Advantages: Leave Around the House for Women to See Your Sensitive Side, Never Need Buy Confetti Again, Maybe You'll Die Before Reading It Disadvantages: Someone will Probably Make You Read It, You Will Then Have to Kill that Person, Sentencing for Book-related Homicide Can be Stringent
Advantages: It constantly has you on the edge of your seat and guides you to some staggering realisations about the characters and events that have occured!!! Disadvantages: none
Advantages: It constantly has you on the edge of your seat and guides you to some staggering realisations about the characters and events that have occured!!! Disadvantages: none
Advantages: Leave Around the House for Women to See Your Sensitive Side, Never Need Buy Confetti Again, Maybe You'll Die Before Reading It Disadvantages: Someone will Probably Make You Read It, You Will Then Have to Kill that Person, Sentencing for Book-related Homicide Can be Stringent
Mar 27th, 2002
very helpful by (100%):
