It's like a slow, creeping seduction. You feel the foreboding first – vicious, poisonous, catastrophic… all swirling together, a darkness so black and deep it chills you to the core.Then comes the dizziness. A history unfolds, whisking you away to New Orleans, Amsterdam, France, Port-au-Prince. A history that's a secret in itself. Incest, greed, lust, revenge, murder, jealousy – so morbid and intricately woven that you're both frightened and utterly thrilled.This is one of the most incredible bo...

This book might very well be the origin of the "info dump." And this info dump is disguised as a family history lesson that drones on for about half of this (very long) book. Also, the rough sex that the two main characters enjoy is disturbingly portrayed as some kind of mutual rape fantasy. Think about that for a second... Michael Curry, presented as your typical Good Guy character, in his most secret, darkest thoughts, fantasizes about raping a woman. And Rowan Mayfair, the smart, strong heroi...

My witch-themed reading marathon concludes with *The Witching Hour*, the eleventh novel by Anne Rice. Published in 1990, I was hoping it might be the author's thirteenth book, but this goth epic of blood, sugar, sex, and black magic is a monster as is. The word count is 327,360 words, 10,000 shy of Stephen King's baby high chair *Under the Dome*. Rice is a gifted scenarist who sets the table for adult horror dripping with sensuality and dread, the type moviegoers had to imagine in the 1940s with...

Okay, full disclosure: this review's gonna be a little biased because of the whole romance factor. So, last summer, me and my guy moved into this gorgeous apartment in the Garden District (back when I was slinging drinks, mind you). It had this killer balcony overlooking Chestnut Street. Place was spotless, except for this box of junk the last tenant left behind. Spoons, a rubber duck, an absolutely hideous vase, and... five Anne Rice novels. I basically spent my summer mornings glued to that ...

Warning: SPOILERS. And gifs. Lots of both, actually.I don't even know how to summarize what I've just finished reading in Anne Rice's *The Witching Hour*. It's like trying to explain a George RR Martin novel. You might try to list things point by point, but everything's so intertwined that there's no way to distinguish anything in the grand scheme. "Oh, y'know. Stuff happens. People threaten each other. People fight. People die. People have sex. More stuff happens. More people fight. More people...

One of my top 3 favorite novels of all time. Anne Rice often gets unfairly dismissed as pure schlock, but what many who haven't actually read her work don't realize is that she's obsessed with history. She immerses herself in a specific time period, learns absolutely everything she can about it, and then crafts characters and places them right in the middle of it. She rarely disappoints me. And her prose is just beautiful. You can sit down to read and suddenly realize that two hours have flown b...

What a peculiar book (although at 1207 pages, "little" isn't exactly the right word)! This was my first foray into the world of Anne Rice, and I fear it might very well be my last.Halfway through "The Witching Hour", I was completely captivated. I loved the idea of The Talamasca. At that point in the story, I would have been thrilled to discover it was a real organization and immediately applied for a job. I reveled in learning the entire Mayfair history. Anne Rice possesses a true gift for choo...

I got this book for Christmas that year. It was my first Anne Rice novel, around a year after *Interview with the Vampire* came out as a movie with Brad Pitt, Christian Slater, and Tom Cruise. I was completely blown away. If you like a story like *Gone With the Wind* on crack—seriously, that epic—but VERY ADULT (moms and dads, keep this one away from the tweens!), then you'll love **The Witching Hour**. It's such an addictive read that you might just get fired for calling in sick to keep reading...

I genuinely enjoyed "The Witching Hour" right up until the very end. It felt like the main character suffered some kind of bizarre personality breakdown and acted in a way that was completely out of character. It honestly made the writing seem sloppy, as if Anne Rice decided in the last ten pages or so that she wanted to write a sequel, even though she'd originally intended it to be a standalone novel. As far as witch books go, this one had me hooked until that disappointing finale.

I *finally* finished this one. Good Lord, what a long-winded mess *The Witching Hour* was. All that drawn-out history was just plain boring, but I stuck with it, and then ended up absolutely hating the ending! Why in the world do I keep reading Anne Rice? Seriously, someone explain it to me. If you're looking for engaging book reviews, maybe skip this one.