Anne Rice is one of those authors who, as for her genre, operated with exquisite style. She is also one of those authors who raised creepy and problematic topics without engaging herself in anything creepy or, worse, criminal. Why do I frame it like this? Because it happens to many authors and because those “creepy elements” quite unnerve me.
“The Witching Hour” is a lengthy novel about the Mayfairs, a rich matriarchal clan of New Orleanian witches. I’m not going to give you too many spoilers here, so I’ll just focus on what was either disturbing or disappointing.
The disturbing part of this story is incest. If you read the backstory, prepare for a woman having sex with her recently met father to have “strong children”. Prepare for the cases in which other Mayfair women had children with their brothers, fathers, or grandfathers. Sorry, but reading about it is traumatic. I think we may agree that parent-filial incest is one of the grossest and most taboo things in our society, and for a reason. I just can’t accept men doing such things to their kinswomen, even if those relationships are described as consensual. The Targaryens or the Lannisters at George R. R. Martin’s? The Buendias with their aunt-nephew obsession? Even they has never disturbed me as much as the Mayfairs did.
Another thing is the main love story between a thirty-year-old Mayfair woman and a man near fifty. It isn’t the age gap that is so troubling; we are talking about two fully adult people with their respective jobs. The dynamics between them are troubling. Really, it doesn’t ring well when the younger woman likes rough sex with the older man, and the older man thinks about her protectively.
These are the troubling parts. What are the disappointing ones? Well, the first thing is that Rice, like many authors of her era, either wrote separate novels about people of colour (“The Feast of all Saints”) or wrote those people as backstage characters. This especially concerns African-Americans. Hello, we are in New Orleans, Louisiana. Where are, for example, free people of colour? Where are stories of whitepassing and hidden Black heritage so common in the literature of the South? You’ve got nothing about this here. The Mayfairs are lily-white French, Irish, Dutch, and Scottish. And slavery? Sadly, the issue is described like, ” Yeah, it was bad, but the Mayfairs were good to their slaves.” End of the story.
And this leads us to how, overall, “The Witching Hour” grapples with the past and history. The documents of the secret paranormal society, Talamasca, describing the Mayfairs, are a big and crucial part of the novel. And they are boring. I don’t need newspaper coverage of magic, incest, and unsolved mysteries. I need a gripping story spanning over two hundred years. I wouldn’t mind some POVs from the past. But there is only one POV like that in the novel. The rest of the historical material, so to speak, is dry and too factual. I don’t feel what it was like in New Orleans in the Antebellum period or in the Roaring Twenties. I feel like reading a long SCP article without SCP’s chilling weirdness.
This is not to say that Rice’s style is bland or that her descriptions of then-contemporary New Orleans and San Francisco aren’t captivating. They are. They taught me something about architecture, cuisine, weather, and flora there. But they cover several decades of the story, while they should have covered about two hundred and fifty years. This is not to say that she doesn’t deftly build a sense of dread; she does, and that’s important in gothic horror. However, the cringy parts are so cringy that they may spoil your joy from reading. I am not exaggerating; they really may.
Since “The Witching Hour”, there have been many novels about female clans of witches, from “Practical Magic” to “Weyward”. Those have been novels focused more on friendship, solidarity, motherhood, or perseverance. I can’t tell you if such novels are better witch family sagas, but one thing is certain: They are less disturbing.
Left Hand of Fiction 