It feels like a slow seduction.You felt the foreboding first. Vicious, poisonous, catastrophic…all mingled together, a darkness so black and deep.You felt the dizziness. A history brought you to various places, New Orleans, Amsterdam, France, Port-air-Prince. A history that was a secret itself. Incest, greed, lust, revenge, murder, jealousy, so morbid and complex that you were frightened. You were thrilled.One of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. It reminds me of how I used to read when I w...

Quite possibly ground zero for the term “info dump.” Said info dump masqueraded as a lesson in family history that droned on for roughly half the (very long) book. Also the rough sex enjoyed by the two MCs was disturbingly portrayed as some kind rape fantasy on both their parts. Think about that for a second . . . Michael Curry, presented as a stock Good Guy character, in his most secret dark thoughts, fantasized about raping a woman, and Rowan Mayfair, the smart, strong heroine, repeatedly aske...

My witchathon 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 thrillers like Cat Peop...

Review is tainted by romance.When my man and I first moved into the Garden District last summer (while I was still a bartender) we moved into a pristine apartment with a gallery balcony which overlooked Chestnut street. Left in our room in an otherwise pristine apartment was a box of clutter left by the previous tenant. She left spoons, a rubber ducky, a hideous vase and five Anne Rice novels. I spent most of the summer mornings on the balcony reading the Mayfair witches series, starting with Th...

Warning: SPOILERS. And gifs. Lots of both, actually.I don't even know how to summarize what I've just finished. It's like trying to tell someone what happens in a George RR Martin novel. You might try to list item by item, but everything is woven with everything else & there's no way to distinguish 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 die. The end."(Sorry, Rob...

One of my top 3 favorite novels of all time. Anne Rice gets a bad rap for being pure shlock, but what most people who haven't read her don't realize is that she is obsessed with history. She studies a particular time period, learns everything she can about it, and then creates characters and sticks them in it. She rarely disappoints me. And her prose is beautiful. You can sit down to read and realize that 2 hours have passed having not even noticed.This book is about a woman named Rowan Mayfair,...

What a queer little book (although at 1207 pages, little isn't the right word)! This was my first attempt at Anne Rice and I fear it might well be my last.Halfway through "The Witching Hour", I was absolutely enthralled. I loved the idea of The Talamasca. At that stage of the story, I would have loved knowing it was a real organisation and applied for a job. I revelled in learning the entire Mayfair history. Anne Rice has a gift for choosing the words that bring it all to life. I could imagine t...

I got this book for Christmas that year. This was my first ever Anne Rice book, and it was about a year after Interview With A Vampire came out as a movie with Brad Pitt, Christian Slater and Tom Cruise. I was blown away people. If you like a story, like Gone With the Wind on crack, no seriously, epic like that, except VERY ADULT (don't let your tweens get their hands on this one Mom's and Dad's!), but such an addicting read that you may just get fired for calling in sick over it.This was far an...

I actually quite enjoyed this book up until the very end, when I felt like the main female character just had some sort of weird personality seizure and did something that the character as you've come to know her just wouldn't have done. It just made it seem poorly written to me, like Ms. Rice decided in the last 10 pages or so that it was going to have a sequel after all when she had been intending from the beginning for it to be a one-book story.

I FINALLY finished this. Good Lord, what a long winded mess this was. All the wordy history was boring but I stuck it out then ended up hating the ending! Why in the world to I keep reading Anne Rice?